


The Five Axioms of Dom Toretto

by FranklyNotReally



Category: Fast and the Furious Series, The Fast and the Furious (2001)
Genre: Anxiety, Brian has an intense inner dialogue, Canon-Typical Violence, Car Accidents, Companionable Snark, Eventual Romance, Families of Choice, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Minor Character Death, Recklessly making up absolute nonsense about fake car things, Slow Burn, Some gratuitous contemporary mentions of scifi, Undercover, also smartphones so I guess this is a contemporary AU somehow, completely out of era pop songs too, so many fake car things I'm sorry, some mention of panic attacks, world without homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-27
Updated: 2017-05-17
Packaged: 2018-09-20 06:27:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 36,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9479384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FranklyNotReally/pseuds/FranklyNotReally
Summary: Brian loves this job. Maybe too much.





	1. Getting In

**Author's Note:**

> [Chapter 1/??] Planning five but let's see how this goes
> 
> [some more notes] Loosely based on the first F&F movie, obviously, but with a lot of plot remixing.

It wasn’t like Brian had never seen tight-knit gangs before. Steal together, stay together, something like that. In a perverse way, it was something that Brian had actually started to envy after two years of undercover work on the west coast. Criminals knew who they were more than so many of the people on the other side. But Brian never seen something like this—this one third car-based frat, one third stunt training center, one third monastery piece of absurdity that was the Toretto house on the border of East LA, home of not only the Toretto siblings but four or five other drivers. According to the FBI and any driver who knew anything west of Colorado, the house was legend.

This was why when Mia invited him over for dinner, Brian couldn’t help himself, if only to see the famous garage.

“It’s the least we could do, after that behavior. At least let me feed you something better than the tuna,” Mia said at the market with her wry smile and quiet but compelling voice. Brian smiled up at her despite the way it made his black eye throb. Mia wasn’t about to apologize for some asshole who’d chosen to make her the justification for his behavior, which Brian appreciated. Despite this, he was so not going to dinner in the lion’s den itself.

“Come on then, Bri,” Dom called from the back room, where he sat most Saturdays, working on some intricate engine piece and ignoring the customers. Except for now. “Eat with us.”

Brian blinked and saw the resemblance to Mia for the first time in Dom’s smile, a sideways half-smile that made you wonder what the full version might look like. “Sure,” he said, because what the hell, because he was a jackass. Get in and get close, that was the job, right? Just don’t go native. He’d wear a piece, leave the panic button in his car on the driver’s side. On second thought, a family of adrenaline junkie felons might not recognize the sacrosanct boundaries of personal property. Just the piece, then. Sure. Because guns never escalated anything. Ok, so he’d go in unarmed. This was turning into a great idea.

Dinner was the first time Brian had Mia’s food for real, and it made the whole risk worth it. She told him later that she’d started cooking at the same time as Dom had started working in the garage, which was Toretto code for when dad died. Most people didn’t know that, but most people didn’t have an FBI file folder five inches deep. What wasn’t in the folder was the way that Mia loved cooking, had a deep shelf of glossy cookbooks built (by Dom, Brian suspected) into the window alcove wall of the kitchen, and would only let the others into Sunday dinner prep with great prejudice.

“I can’t,” Brian protested as Mia ladled a third serving of ratatouille into his bowl. Could he have predicted French dining, warm homemade crusty bread and all, in the home of LA’s most notorious street racing family? No he could not. He really had the best job.

“So Brian, you work near the market? I hear you there every day,” Jesse asked, moving steadily through his fourth steaming bowl without sign of fatigue.

Vince ate gamely from where he sat on Dom’s right hand side. The resident ‘roid machine, Brian noted with some satisfaction, still had noticeable bruising from Brian’s righteous fists of self-defense earlier in the week. The fact that Brian had double the bruising himself was a fact he chose to ignore. Brian waited expectantly, but Vince didn’t seem to have anything to say. Mia’s eyes flicked to Dom, who was buttering a piece of bread with the single-minded purpose of a man who had fresh french crust but once a week. Brian made an internal note, confirmation of what he’d already assumed, but now it was axiom number one: Dom’s the boss.

“I work at Frank’s,” Brian said. “Since, recently, just getting by, right?” he waved a hand in a way that was meant to be more charming than stupid, but the table was silent. Tough felon types, clinking of spoons, eyes that probably hid murders. This was going great. “I work in the backroom” on engines, “I moved from Arizona in May,” he added unnecessarily. Mia smiled. Her eyes probably didn’t hide murders. He hoped.

It’s not like Brian kept up a persona for long jobs—not exactly, nobody could keep that up under pressure for weeks at a time, at least not somebody who wasn’t a spook—but he let himself play up the eagerness, words slipping out like he wasn’t monitoring, quick smiles. It’s easier to trust people who don’t seem like they’re holding much back, and Brian loved this part of the job, the little threads of trust that wrapped you up against people before they even noticed.

“Frank!” Jesse exclaimed, resident gear-head, “He stocks the best import parts, not that Dom enjoys that,” he sniggered. Dom raised an eyebrow over the bread but it looked like an indulgent eyebrow. The kid must have been the youngest in the family, maybe eighteen or nineteen, and he probably wasn’t there to be a college student. Brian penciled in a hypothetical second axiom which would need further proof: Torettos take in strays.

Knowing Frank, it turned out, was something to talk about. As was being someone that Mia liked, which Brian felt particularly proud of because he’d followed his instincts on making friends with the Toretto sister three weeks ago, wandering into the market after his second day of work at the body shop. But the best in of all was the cars.

“I left a Supra back home,” Brian said, pitching his voice at just the right level of loss. It wasn’t exactly a lie, although home was South Dakota, not Arizona, but leaving a car like that would imply a financial situation that could help test the stray theory.  
Dom’s head lifted from the bread for the first time in about fifteen minutes, not that Brian was counting. “That’s a nice make,” he said. “Any mods?”

Brian felt absurdly like a kid who’d studied for the pop quiz bonus question instead of a grown-ass man who was a professional, and making a silent case for himself to join a secretive car cult, and cool, dammit.

“Yeah,” he said casually, “I put in a J-frame and about ten k worth of injection, and,” maybe he should stop there because he was getting outside the novice driver story, but he missed that damn car, “I reworked the pistons with a lift from a Dodge.” Letty and Jesse, the more expressive of the family, both snorted air in a synchronicity that would’ve been cute if Letty hadn’t been so terrifying.

Dom didn’t react but his eyes were bright, gave Brian the eerie sensation that he could see right through him. “That’s a unique blend,” he said, with what might have been approval, but might have been surprise, and Brian was hoping so, because he was willing to bet it took something truly special to pull the interest of LA’s street racing king. “J-frame instead of the Y, huh.”

Brian frowned. “A Y would blow out a Supra,” he said, “It’s too heavy.”

“Whereas a J will last you about two seconds on the road,” Dom shot back, “Better to field some drag than ruin your car in a single run.”

“When you win by two seconds, you still win,” Brian shot right back. And when Dom’s elusive smile came out, he knew he was in.

*

Over the next few weeks Brian visited Mia at the market, and they started trading books.

“Do you like sci-fi?” he asked in between bites of a panini. Dom wasn’t there today, so no progress on that front, but he was starting to genuinely enjoy Mia. Like Dom she was quiet but perceptive, drawing talk from the people around her with dark eyes and some kind of indescribable, captivating sense of stability. Brian put it down to confidence.

“Star Trek shit?” She said skeptically, polishing the new grill. Mia had bought a countertop grill from Sur La Table that cost more than the last mods Brian had put in the Mitsubishi the FBI had begrudgingly let him pull from the garage, but then again, it was a good panini. Mia shook her head.

“You’ll like it,” Brian said confidently, sliding Three Body Problem over the counter.

“This’ll blow your mind. English translation of this Chinese guy. It’s all technology and first contact and international, galactic politics. Also ships, which are kind of like cars if you squint,” he added helpfully.

Mia laughed in a way that Brian could get used to, like being enjoyed instead of mocked. “How is it you read so much?” She took the novel and stacked it on top of the three that Brian had already forced on her, two contemporary and one young adult that Brian insisted was extremely mature, some of the best writing was happening in young adult these days.

Brian shrugged one shoulder, mouth full of panini. He’d pegged the Torettos as people who liked intelligence, people who wouldn’t be turned off or threatened by it, but intrigued. Getting punched out by Vince was a lucky strike by way of an introduction, but loaning stuff was a good way to make people feel quietly in your debt, connected. Brian didn’t have a lot of stuff anyone would be interested in, but reading a metric fuckton of books during the long slow evenings in miserable FBI one bedrooms had given him something to work with. And he needed someone to appreciate the madness of Cixin’s sophons.

“So listen,” Brian said, choosing his next words carefully, but biting into the panini like he couldn’t care less, “Lotta nice cars around this market.”

Mia smiled easily, so much more easily than her brother. “Lot of nice men, too.”

Brian drummed his fingers on the counter. He suspected that Mia had better gaydar than anyone else in the family, but that wasn’t saying much in a family made up of oblivious loudmouths like Vince and Jesse. He was pretty sure that he was past the obligatory flirting with Mia and onto an actual friendship that they could both enjoy, but, that comment was something to followup on later. Or bi-dar? Was bi-dar a thing? Focus. He cleared his throat and smiled so, so brightly.

“RX-7s parked around the block every night? I may be still finding my way around this town but I feel like there’s something going on beyond changing tires and I’m in a mood to find out. This weekend?”

Mia took the rag unnecessarily back to the new grill, wiping at an invisible spot of oil.

“Why not,” she said with that easy Toretto grace, like some kind of blue collar Italian princess, like Brian hadn’t spent the last two months working his way up to this moment of trust, getting punched in the face, coming over to dinner, dropping his knowledge of Japanese imports, putting up with freakin’ Vince. “Frank told us last week that we should give you a shot.”

“Oh it took Frank to convince you,” Brian shot back, delighted. Frank had been his idea after all. His instincts were flying high on this job, Bilkins was gonna eat shit for it. Bilkins was the reason he was putting up with a Mitsubishi and not a Supra, so fair’s fair.

“We’re at Vinestine and Third at 2am,” Mia said, “But wear shoes you can walk in when you crash your two-second engine.”

“Cool, I’ll wear flats and save the heels for the afterparty,” Brian said, probably pushing his luck, felons and all. But Mia just kept on smiling.

*

Brian took exactly three quarters of a Lorazepam and drank more water than he wanted to. He had three hours before he needed to prep any gear for the Mitsubishi. He requisitioned some injectors from Frank on his fifth day of work to save himself from at least utter humiliation, after his quick scan through the surveillance of Toretto’s muscle. His muscle _cars_. True to dinner conversation, the guy favored heavy cars, all-American, serious weight but persistent. The kind of car you’d see rising in your rearview window long after you thought you’d left them in the dust.

Brian bounced up and down in place, shaking out his arms. He considered whether dancing it out to a Beyonce soundtrack in the center of his in-name-only living room would make him more, or less likely to play the role that would impress a crowd of LA’s most dangerous. Obviously more.

Tanner had to shout to be heard over the battlecry of _Sweet Dreams_.

“You’re fucking doing what the fuck?” He screeched. Brian held the phone over his head and pumped it up and down in time to the disco-pop.

“I’m gonna drive tonight!”

“No, absolutely the fuck not, mother fucker!” Tanner continued screeching. At this point in the operation, Brian had learnt that Tanner wasn’t much different from his step-dad: you just had to wait for him to get it out.

“It’s why you gave me a car,” Brian said patiently when Tanner finally paused for breath in between protocols, strategic information-gathering, and acceptable margins of risk.

“It’s not enough to just hang around and talk motors. I’ve gotta get into these people’s lives, I’ve gotta show them I’m real. You know I’m right, Tanner. You know this is the only way.”

Tanner growled but didn’t actually use words, which Brian took to be a point on his side. He turned the music down because you gotta give a little to get a little.

“I know you don’t like it, but the race is gonna happen whether I’m there or not, we’ve already made a choice here.” Brian tapped the fingers of his free hand against the outside of his thigh. He’d convince even himself with a tone like that.

“Fine,” Tanner ground out after a long enough pause to assert some power. “You drive, and you lose, by a lot. We’re not having a death in this operation, even if it’s just yours.”

“Not gonna be that hard in the car you gave me,” Brian said, not annoyed, not at all, who cared about winning? Not Brian. Bey would forgive him. Bey understood.

“Ok,” Tanner said, sounding weary in the way that only handlers can be. “But you know what, you watch how deep you get out there.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Brian asked.

Tanner was silent for a beat. “It means you’re right, you’re the only guy we’ve got who can do this job, but that’s exactly what worries me. Don’t get too good at this.”

With that piece of unhelpfulness Tanner hung up, which Brian guessed meant that he was free to pursue the exciting life and times of Brian Spilner, not-so-secret hobby street car racer and daytime mechanic from Nowheresville, Arizona, infiltrator of racing families, super-spy, definitely _not_ in over his head.

Brian eyed the bottle of Lorazepam but thought better of it. One staved off the occasional post-race adrenaline crash that he avoided mentioning to people like Tanner, but more might give him the kind of heavy-lidded look that only Dom Toretto could make look badass, and would definitely dull the reflexes that might just keep him alive tonight. Brian pulled on a blue t-shirt and a grey jacket, because he could do casual straight-guy-driver, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t also bring out his eyes.

*

Sometimes you can track bad-goings-ons in a city with the music and noise bringing the energy, riling up the crowd. Wannabe gangsters have a thing for speakers. In this scene, though, it was silence. Silent streets, silent people walking purposefully down sidewalks they had no business being on. It was like there was a private concert happening at Vinestine and Third and the whole city had taken an oath not to talk about it, just converged in a quiet, stealthy mass.

Brian cleared his head and started taking mental notes, because this wasn’t in the file; Toretto’s scene was so well organized that the LAPD had never had the intel to infiltrate a race night. Maybe three hundred, four hundred people. A big group for something like this, though, and well-behaved. This racing scene had been built from the ground up, and it was solid, and it was weirdly respectful, and it didn’t seem like the kind of place that would cave on its own. Brian wondered, not for the first time, if Tanner and the rest of the FBI really understood what an institution they were coming up against. Bilkins, LAPD piece of crap though he was, had had a reason for the smirking shadow he cast on the whole op. There were entire families with kids here, for chrissakes.

Brian parked the Mitsubishi alongside a beautiful hunk of orange with a tiger painted on the side and white wall tires. Tacky, he sniffed, but marvelous, like somebody having fun in a way that South Dakota had never tolerated. Brian walked his white ass swiftly through the crowd towards a familiar-looking whirl of trouble, Toretto drivers winging around the atomic center of mass that was Dom.

“You came.”

Brian expected it to be Mia greeting him, but it was Dom’s voice, and it was low and warm and…pleased. Brian had pictured something more hyped from a man about to win twenty grand. Dom was leaning against the hood of a classic black charger looking like someone about to down a case of Corona and pass out on their own couch, not someone about to race upwards of 150 miles an hour through an urban nightmare. Then again, for Dom Toretto, maybe it was both tonight.

“You brought some backbone to LA riding that car,” Dom said, and Jesse snickered from where he was hopping around next to the right headlight. At least somebody had the right idea about how to feel before driving at speeds that god did not intend through streets that were not intended by man, either.

Brian flipped them off genially, and turned away from Toretto’s aggravating face, and spread his hands out as if he could grasp all the cars in between his fingers.

“I missed this,” Brian said, and it was a half-lie until he realized it wasn’t, and he let himself look around with a full-out smile and wide eyes. So many beautiful machines, and he hadn’t even seen them move yet.

“Yeah,” Dom agreed, as if he understood, and maybe he did, and maybe there was something just a little less sarcastic and guarded in the big man’s voice. Brian caught himself looking at Dom’s hands for just a little too long, one wrapped easily around two bottles, muscle-bound forearms not even a little cold in the mild Southern California night. Brian blinked and turned away, walking a few steps out into the street to look at safer, more static machines.

“That one yours?” He asked Letty, and the woman gave a surprised start.

“Yes,” she said quietly. It was a subtle Nissan, straight black with no fancy decals, but it was lithe, held a custom double lock transmission that people of Letty’s gender presentation didn’t usually commandeer, and it was definitely illegal in the US.

“Amazing on a curve, right?” Brian said, “And I like the wheel work.”

It was hard to see from the top, but Letty had replaced the underside of the chassis with custom pins to enable better traction and quicker shifts on tight turns, compensating for the Nissan’s wider nose with a weighted balance. The gears and the edge of one pin-hook gave it away. It must have been weeks of hard, delicate work, and painstakingly matching pins pulled from other engines.

“Yeah,” Letty said, “We went 0-5 last month in Vegas, finished the Diablo.” This was understated, because Letty was understated; nobody had ever finished the Diablo and then driven the same car again, at least not back when Brian kept track of what happened in Vegas. It was also the most information she’d ever volunteered directly to Brian.

“Amazing,” he said softly and sincerely, and just like that, he was in. Brian, who knew a thing or two about being the underestimated one in a group just because you were _pretty_ , tried to make a habit of not doing it to other people. And for all the posturing, he’d bet it was Letty, not Vince, who was Dom’s right-hand driver. You see a hole opening up in front of you, and you slip through before the drivers have time to blink.

The night started moving fast after that. There was a quick teaser of a race, a face-off between two Asian guys who’d been biting circles around each other for the last month. They had a cadre of motorcycle minions who drove with their holsters just a little too conspicuous on the side. Typical LA third-generation assholes, Brian guessed, letting down the grandmothers who worked nights and weekends cleaning offices to get them there. Tanner and Bilkins didn’t think the Asian gangs were behind the heists—too young, didn’t have loyalty behind them like Toretto. That being said, Brian kept his eyes peeled. He wasn’t convinced that the Toretto gang would be the one they were after, anyway, it just seemed so incongruous with how hard they all worked together, how much they seemed to care. He was objectively searching for all the possible leads. He definitely was not starting to hope that the Torettos would come up clean, against all odds.

“Wake up, Arizona!” Jesse laughed near his ear. Brian snapped to attention and the people were moving, running, jostling, motors turning over. The kid took off, not to race, but to watch. Humming and vibrating engines shook through his hands, rattling up from his feet on the pavement. Brian bounced minisculely from the balls of his feet to his heels. It was time to go. He rolled the Mitsubishi’s key between his fingers.

“Hey,” Brian felt a warm hand on his shoulder, but if he knew the Torettos, and he was beginning to feel like he did, Mia was already tucked off safely at the finish line.

“No suicides allowed in our races,” Dom said, but the underbite of his tone was a laugh, and his hand was light but firm. Brian gave him a sideways look that he hoped said something like, _no promises_ , or _I drive to win_ or _I am a worthy contender to join your scarily tight-knit family_ but it may have accidentally said _I do not know what to do with your unexpectedly protective instincts but honestly right now I have to not die, so I will think about it later_. Either way there wasn’t time, so Brian pulled his eyes away and they were both running for their cars, and Brian peeled off in the Mitsubishi.

*

The thing about driving was that it was the most peaceful place in the world. You’d think it would be hell, but it turns out if you smoke your own nerves past terror and through the roof of the human capacity for adrenaline, you reach a kind of a zen where your brain just says, you know what, forget it. Brian felt his bones rattle into the minimal upholstery of the Mitsubishi, shaking as one with the engine like the closest thing to meditation. He flipped through gears, slid beautifully around a tight corner, and would have laughed out loud if he hadn’t been pressed up against the seat. It was pain and terror and the dumbest shit in the world, and the closest thing to peace that Brian ever felt.

An orange wide-body RX-7 screeched off a traffic light pole in front of him, and shuddered into non-commission, and that looked like a bad one. Brian spent a second wondering if Toretto paid off the LAPD traffic cams or if it just didn’t matter because any car that raced these streets wouldn’t live to see the morning. He pulled hard to get around the RX-7 and lost a precious few meters but also didn’t die, so that evened out.

One of the Asian assholes (Satoshi? Rich parents, penchant for cocaine?) was in the lead, flying high but burning out fast. He wasn’t gonna hold onto that lead. Dom was holding a steady second in his Dodge, and Brian tried to watch his own road instead of waiting and watching for Dom to pull ahead. So far, he hadn’t seemed like anything but relaxed, running steady behind the lead like he was waiting.

And then it happened, Satoshi gunned it and as Brian expected, his engine burnt out, losing meters. Dom lapped him easily, spinning off into the most brutal curve of the race, a sharp corner edged by two buildings with little room to spare. Satoshi wrenched to the right in an unsurprisingly dick move, hoping to clip the Dodge and spin Dom off the course and into a wall. Dom hit the brakes almost before Satoshi even moved, and all he had to do was watch as Satoshi steered himself straight off the road. So there was the driving they talked about.

From what was now second place, Brian focused on avoiding the wreckage and keeping a calm tail on Dom, but he had a plan for the next corner, Tanner or no Tanner. In the rearview it was a fight for third place, but Brian blocked it all out, feeling an ominous rattle of the Mitsubishi that would definitely worry him if he had room to think about.

The finish line was in sight and Dom was cruising for it, which was going to be his undoing. Brian took a breath, flipped the NOS, and slammed to the side where Dom had left a wide open path—right on the sidewalk. He had just half a second to see Dom’s face looking extremely displeased on his right, and then there were cops everywhere, and they were fucked.


	2. Getting Started

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brian has a new plan. A good plan. He hopes.

Brian made a mental note to kill Bilkins at the first available opportunity. The Mitsubishi whined, coming in hot on a finish line that didn’t exist anymore, torn to pieces by the LAPD.  Brian sighed.

“I was going to win,” he said to nobody in particular.

Brian shot the Mitsubishi through the mid-tier over-modded Acuras clustered around where the finish line should’ve been. He made five, no, six black-and-whites, two of them smugly positioned down the street in a clumsy blockade and the other four cars creating general mayhem for the tightly-packed street racers. Brian was unsurprised to sense nothing on his right, the Dodge already vanished through an exit that was now blocked by escaping drivers.  But there was a hole--straight ahead through the finish line, a gap in the inexpert blockade--and if he gunned the Mitsubishi they could make it. But there were also people, running and panicking across the street.

Brian turned sharply to the left, down the street already packed with fleeing cars, cursing quietly but relentlessly.  He wove with a steady hand, past a Nissan, around a fire hydrant, up on the sidewalk and back to the street. Brian was clear of the cluster of cars in less than twenty seconds, and he booked it through a back alley and looped around, three streets west of the action, and then he could breathe again. For a moment Brian’s hand twitched towards his ear, but there was no piece, no way to reach Tanner, no backup on this one. He prayed that the LAPD would show some restraint and no one would get hurt over something as dumb as a 20k race. Bastards.

The engine was keeping up a high-pitched yowl that made Brian wince, but they could pay for the replacement with Bilkins’ life insurance policy. Brian pointed the Mit’s nose towards the closed high-rise garage that he’d scoped earlier in the day for a dumping ground. On the street, people were still running.

Dom Toretto should have been long gone. But suddenly there he was, rounding a corner near the garage on foot and looking like a guy who just pulled himself out of the wreckage of a Dodge that had slammed into a wall at 90 rather than hit someone in the crowd. He also looked like a guy who didn’t know where he was going, or that the police were about to sweep this street and put anybody on it in custody. Brian didn’t even need to think. He pulled the wheel sharply to the left and slid right into Dom’s path.

“Get in,” he yelled, and Dom lunged for the door, lifted it in a heartbeat, and threw himself in the passenger seat.

“Mia?” Brian asked tightly as he rolled the Mit up the curved driveway of the garage.

“Home,” Dom said, and there was a calm reassurance in his tone that settled Brian’s nerves in an instant. He was still seething internally over the LAPD’s bumbling, potentially catastrophic presence in _their op_ , but that could be tucked away for the eventual pissing match between Tanner and Bilkins later. For now, he couldn’t lose the tentative thread he had on the Torettos, not with Dom right there in the car.  

“Letty,” Brian asked, “Everybody else?”

Dom nodded. “Letty had an exit on mark halfway through the race, Jesse and Vince in the car. They’re good, Brian. We’re good.”

Brian chuckled weakly, let the relief spill out. Brian Spilner wouldn’t have been in many raids. Trust Dominic Toretto to exude preternatural calm even now. He tucked away the discovery that what Dom also must have is an earpiece to the crew, something small enough that Brian hadn’t noticed it earlier. That kind of equipment seemed a little bit beyond the needs of a street race.

Brian felt Dom’s heavy gaze on him as he rolled the Mitsubishi through its last twenty feet, into a dark corner of the garage. Tanner would arrange for a pickup within the next few hours. Or perhaps...Brian pondered the beginnings of a plan, and made another mental note to call Tanner.

“This way,” Brian led Dom towards the far stairwell, down the flight, and through the building that connected to the garage. The two men groped through a dark hallway for a few moments during which Brian counted his heartbeats, willing them to slow down. The race was over, the Torettos were safe, and maybe, just maybe, this night was still going to be worth something. Then a doorway opened up in front of them and Dom laughed, a real laugh, full and dark and infectious.

Brian had led Dom into the open air courtyard of an office park, shielded from the street outside--and anyone on it--by a gated wall. A yellow streetlight illuminated a quietly burbling fountain, two benches, and what Brian thought was a rather handsome garden for an office park. On the street outside, the cops were sweeping up the unlucky slow, but they would never think to look in here. Brian flung himself down on one of the benches and grinned up at Dom.

“Letty wasn’t the only one with an exit on mark,” he said.

“Full of surprises, aren’t you,” Dom said.

Brian raised one shoulder in a casual shrug. “I figured, new to town, I don’t wanna get caught with my pants down when things go south.”

Brian questioned that metaphor the instant he heard it out loud, but continued gamely.

“So yeah, we should wait here an hour. I counted six, they’re here to round people up for real.”

Dom’s face tightened, and Brian tried not to look nervous. The man was intimidating enough in normal circumstances, but seeing his fists clench and muscles tense into a fighting stance did terrible things to the base of Brian’s spine.  In reality, everyone nabbed tonight would probably be let go in the morning, more of an intimidation tactic than anything else, but Brian wouldn’t blame the scene for a marked suspicion of the LAPD’s ability to act with restraint. And Dom looked ready to take every one of them on, individually.

Brian took a couple of calming breaths, and thought about how they should spend the hour. Twenty questions? _You tell me if you’re the gang stealing from the trucks and I’ll tell you…_

“Why’d you do it?” Dom said, interrupting Brian’s productive line of thought. Dom crossed his arms over his chest and Brian actually _saw_ the shift as the bigger man forced himself to relax, set aside worrying for the crowd until he could do something about it. That made two of them.

“Do what?” Brian asked blankly.

“Back there,” Dom said, “I saw it at the finish line. You could’ve pushed right through the cops before they’d set up the blockade. Took a real risk going left instead.”

Brian blinked. “Everybody was at the line,” he said.  “It was chaos, I might have hit somebody.”

Dom tilted his head to the side. Standing while Brian was sitting, he cast a long shadow in the streetlight.  “They would’ve gotten out of the way if they had to.”

Brian shook his head. He had a sense that he was being tested, like something had opened up between him and Toretto here in the dim garden, living through a race together, hiding from a raid together, some crucial window of opportunity, but he didn’t know what Toretto was looking for, so he just answered honestly.

“ _That’s_  real risk,” he said, “And I don’t do that with people’s lives.”

Dom nodded, and window was closed, and Brian didn’t know if he’d found whatever it was. But then Dom walked around the fountain to sit on the bench next to Brian’s, his shadow disappearing into a hydrangea bush.

“So we’ve got an hour to kill,” he said, “Tell me about Arizona.”

 

*

It was five in the morning and Brian might have been exhausted, but he was too content to tell. Sprawled out on a Toretto couch that easily sat seven, a fourth beer in one hand and a bowl of Mia’s absurdly gourmet popcorn in easy reach, Brian wondered briefly if moving was a good idea. He thought not.

From across the living room, Jesse was flipping frenetically through tv channels.

“Just pick one,” Letty said, her legs draped over the arm of a shared loveseat that was big enough for Letty, Jesse, and a second giant bowl of popcorn between them. They’d already watched two episodes from the third season of _Star Trek: The Next Generation,_ Jesse’s favorite show, at which point Mia had put her head down on her knees with a loud groan and announced that she was going upstairs to bed.  Vince had already put himself to bed in the corner of the living room, oblivious or maybe just used to the post-race all nighter. Dom had vanished into the bowels of the house somewhere, probably putting a new engine together for a new Dodge, Brian imagined sleepily, drunkenly. There was a man who couldn’t relax unless he had a piece of metal in his hands.

Brian and Dom had spent an hour together on the benches in the office park.  After scraping his brain for every Arizona factoid he’d memorized, Brian made the mistake of criticizing 1970s Chevrolets, and the conversation devolved into trash talking everything from Brian’s NOS timing to the way that Mia’s NST-X hung drag on a windy day. By the end of the hour they’d found common ground in Satoshi’s terrible driving, attitude, and general character, and when the streets cleared Dom led the way to a pickup point where Letty took both of them back to the Toretto house without a comment. Dom had gently pushed Brian by the back of his arm to the big couch in the living room, which he’d fallen into and stayed on ever since. A warm halo of calm hovered over the room, and it smelled like Mia’s cheddar-and-sage popcorn, empty beer bottles and warm blankets.

Brian supposed that this could be what Tanner meant when he said, _watch how deep you get out there._ But it felt too good to let go--this kind of _in_ , that was, the way the door had opened at the Toretto house and Mia had given him a high five, a “holy shit, we got through that together” sort of high five, the look in Dom’s eyes and the way he’d touched Brian’s arm that felt almost as good as the finish line he should’ve gotten credit for. And if there was unease in the back of Brian’s mind over how this race would finish, he didn’t let himself bring it into focus.

“Spilner,” Leon said, a new driver Brian had met an hour before when he stumbled downstairs to watch Beverly Crusher face a moral dilemma in _The High Ground_ that Brian felt some sympathy for. Leon tossed a spare tv remote at Brian’s face and he snapped his right arm up, reflexes still honed from the race, batting the remote back hard across the room.

“Fuck you,” Leon said with no rancor at all. “Just wanted to wake you up, there’s a bed upstairs for ya when you need it.”

“Toretto hospitality, not only blessing us with our racing scene, but the best bed and breakfast this side of the Sierras,” Brian yawned. The ceiling in the living room was starting to look a little lighter, which meant the sun was rising, which meant tomorrow might actually start happening, which Brian did not particularly feel like thinking about.

“Something like that,” Jesse snorted. Letty kicked him indulgently in the side. Brian tried to blink his eyes more open, “What’s that?”

Jesse rubbed his side and winked at Brian. “You’re cool, Bri,” he said, “That’s all. We like you.”

“Jury’s out,” Letty grunted, but Brian knew she didn’t mean it because he’d taken her side when Jesse tried to make them switch to _Enterprise,_ christ.  But yeah, maybe bed was a good idea.

Brian let himself smile large at Jesse over Letty’s indifferent shoulder as he pulled himself off the couch, because chemistry was nice even when you knew you were too old for somebody, way too old. But you might as well encourage the next generation.

“You just like me cuz I win races,” he called over his shoulder as he followed Leon up the stairs for the weirdest sleepover in his already weird career.

“That too!” Jesse exclaimed, and Brian thought he heard a low, rumble of a laugh from the kitchen, but maybe it was just his imagination.

 

*

Sunglasses on, extra-large latte in one hand, Brian barely made it twenty steps outside of his favorite cafe before he was slammed into the hood of a cop car. He sighed, deeply, and watched his breath making a little half-moon of condensation on the cold morning metal as some asshole wrestled his wrists into handcuffs with unnecessary force.

“You could’ve just asked me to come quietly,” Brian muttered in the backseat. The cops in the front didn’t turn, so maybe the _entire_ LAPD wasn’t utterly incompetent.

“We were told to be convincing,” the driver said out of the corner of his mouth with a small, wolfish smile. Brian watched longingly out the window as the puddle of coffee disappeared behind them.

Bilkins, trying to appear stoic and unaffected, was leaning against a desk in the LA house serving as their command center. Despite having about two feet and sixty pounds on Tanner, he visibly flinched as the FBI lead stabbed a finger into his chest.

“And in further bullshit, _”_ Tanner spat between clenched teeth, “I find that you don’t _know_ about this raid, that some fuckwit rubber stamper in another department sent the intel to your street racer taskforce, a taskforce that _I had been assured was shut down._ _”_

“A miscommunication,” Bilkins ventured. Brian shook his head from the doorway, because you don’t interrupt Tanner when he’s venting like a Sioux Falls heater on a January night.

“O’Connor,” Tanner said, a fraction calmer but without leaving Bilkins’ personal space, “What’s a miscommunication?”

Brian took a moment to think, sipped thoughtfully at the fresh latte he’d gotten at the door from Megan, who was an angel with a sidearm.

“Like when you yell to the DJ to play you some Rhi-Rhi,” he said, “But he plays Bieber.”

“Thank you, O’Connor,” Tanner said, “My dear law enforcement friend, O’Connor gives us an example of an aural miscommunication. Unpleasant, perhaps, a musical snafu, as it were. What your idiot friends have done is _ass-hattery_.”

The smaller man’s eyes had bugged out so far they looked like they might fall out of their sockets, but he was momentarily out the words to express his rage. In lieu, Tanner bounced from one side to the other like the world’s oldest featherweight boxer getting ready for the next punch. Brian smirked across the room at Bilkins, who was going to be dealing with this for at least the next twenty-four hours.

Bilkins sighed the sigh of an LAPD representative on a cross-functional collaborative sting. It was a long, and heavy, and endless sigh.

“Rest assured,” he said, “We’re treating this seriously. The heads have been suspended pending internal review, and honestly Tanner, nobody meant to disrupt things. They heard about the race through a separate channel and they didn’t even know about our op, you know it’s deep cover. It was a cock-up.”

“You rang?” Brian chirped, sparing Bilkins out of the goodness of his heart, lord only knew why.

“Tell me you got us something good last night, at least,” Tanner said, glowering sideways at Bilkins in the very definition of _this isn’t over._

Brian took a considering sip of coffee. “Well they don’t think I’m a cop now,” he said, “Not that a cop would’ve lived a tenth of a mile last night.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Bilkins asked. Brian ignored him.

“You got my message about the car?”

“I got your message,” Tanner said, “But I didn’t like it.”

Brian grinned. “You don’t like anything. But this is the right call.”

Tanner considered, and Brian drank more coffee, a _lot_  more coffee. He was about to spend hours taking detailed notes about everything that happened last night, cars, makes, the loose sketch of the other gang associations he’d picked up on before the race, let alone everything he’d learned about the Torettos--it was gonna be a multi-latte kind of day, and he thanked past-Brian for remembering to put Rhi-Rhi on his phone and headphones in his pocket.

“Ok,” Tanner said, finally, reluctantly. “Car’s where you left it, and we’ll open up the budget on parts. But this is a stupid decision, Brian, and I just want that on the record.”

Brian, whose life was just one big package of stupid decisions tied together by luck, tipped his latte to the Bureau chief and headed to the computer room for the interminable hell that was FBI paperwork.

 

*

Sleep deprivation and hangover and paperwork aside, Brian had never felt so good after a race. Back in Vegas, post-race days had been a blur of hotel rooms and quiet tvs tuned to something soothing, blocking the outside world. But maybe it was the LA sunshine, or the long night on a comfortable couch with surprisingly entertaining racers, or the feeling of adventure this job was giving him. Whatever it was, Brian practically skipped to the garage.

But when he got there, he faltered. The Mitsubishi was gone. Brian groaned internally and started taking mental stock of just how many salvageable parts he’d lost, not to mention his best excuse to spend hours around Toretto and co. He’d whipped out his burner to call Megan and start the humiliating process of explaining how he’d lost an entire car, when something on the ground caught his eye, and he stooped to pick up a long, thin metal object. Brian turned it over in his fingers, a pushrod, but he knew this shape -- American, probably a Dodge. Brian shook his head gently, but he couldn’t stop the shit-eating grin spreading over his face.

 

*

The famous Toretto garage was beautiful, like a house its own right, with a spotless front office and plenty of light to illuminate the metal bodies on the floor. Brian had spent enough time squinting under dark hoods to appreciate a high ceiling, lofty ventilation, and the efficient florescent lights that Dom had installed every twenty feet.

Since Vince seemed nowhere in sight, Brian walked swiftly and confidently past Letty’s Nissan on the jack to where his bright green Mitsubishi Eclipse was tucked into the far corner. Perched nonchalantly on the hood, Jesse was typing into a laptop with Leon watching and yawning over one shoulder.

“Oh heya Bri,” Jesse said, “Dom said you’d be by! I have some ideas, want to take a look?”

“Sure?” Brian said weakly. Leon chuckled and ruffled the youngest member of the Toretto clan’s already-messy hair.

“Jesse here is our resident artist,” he informed Brian in a slow drawl. Where everyone else in the house had a different kind of intensity, Leon seemed notable for his chill. “He may not be able to drive, but he sure can see the possibilities.”

Jesse slid off the engine and waved Brian forward. On the screen in some rendering program, he’d drawn up a map of the Mitsubishi’s frame. On top of that, he’d overlaid a sketch like some sort of blueprint, mods to the engine and a suggestion of something very different indeed. Even at a glance, Brian could see that _this_  was the reason Jesse was a member of the garage, too.

“Unfortunately, my man, I think your car has seen better days.”

Brian snorted, but Jesse just rolled on.

“That doesn’t mean we can’t use the pieces you’ve already put in. And with a hybrid, well, I should really let Dom tell you, because I think he has a plan-”

“A plan for what?” Brian asked, spinning the pushrod around the fingers of one hand.

“For what we’re gonna do here,” came Dom’s voice behind him, and Brian counted for a second before he turned around, schooled his face to neutral. Dominic Toretto stood there looking at him with nothing but clear and direct expectation in his face, like he had every right in the world to pick up Brian’s car, like he knew Brian would come here, like he was in charge, now. Brian looked down at the pushrod in his hand.

“You know, littering is a three hundred dollar fine in California,” he said. Dominic took a step forward, and Brian took a step back before he could catch himself.

“Is that so,” Dom said, a dangerous tilt to his mouth that Brian definitely wasn’t looking at. “So did you come here to bring me in?”   
  
Brian threw the pushrod, hard, and Dom caught it easily out of the air, as fast as he was strong.

“Why don’t you tell me why I came here?” Brian asked, just one stupid decision after another, but sometimes when you smoke the adrenaline through the roof, you come out on the other side and find peace, if only you have the guts to follow it.

Dom stepped back and turned away, but before Brian could feel disappointed, the racing king pointed the pushrod to the car across from Letty’s Nissan, a shape Brian somehow missed in the shadow when he’d been looking for the Mitsubishi. A Supra.

“You came here for the same reason we’re all here,” Dom said, and Brian tore his eyes from the car long enough to see something real flit across his face, maybe even a third axiom, filed away in his brain to examine later, “To do the work.”


	3. Getting Real

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This was about exactly one thing: finishing the job. And getting free.

_ Then  _

The hijackings had started six months ago, and it was like nothing anybody in Organized Crime had ever seen. Rightfully, incidents like this wouldn’t have even pinged the FBI’s radar. Theft on this scale, merely tens of thousands of dollars, was rarely worth their time. And these strikes definitely shouldn’t have been on the radar – five events spaced out over months, only a small group of people could be relying on this kind of supply.

But it was more than that. The methods were so unusual, the analysts couldn’t quite believe they were just isolated hijackings pulled off by a single, small gang. And then there were the stories coming in from the truckers and the shipping companies, and from the puzzled Southern California cops. Street racers, highly skilled, with high value mod engines and uncanny reflexes, drove  _ underneath  _ a semi, picked the bottom out of the trailer and scooped its contents out like the innards of a watermelon. Or they shot projectiles, wrenched the reinforced industrial doors off the trailer back and climbed aboard with thrust ladders like god-damn pirates. Or they corralled the trucks at ninety miles an hour, expertly steering them down hills and into runoff ramps where the driver would vanish, found months later back home in Mexico, paid off and with nothing more to say than a shrug. They were polite, he’d say.

So what was it really, a test? Somebody setting up what was going to be their future empire of chaos, joyriding into a career of terrorism and funding a training camp for their post apocalyptic army with lifted electronics? Maybe they were starting with a small cadre of skilled drivers, and testing their methods until they could sell their skills on the black market. Maybe they were test-driving strategies that were going to be used in a Middle East desert next year. Special showing, California only. Either way, there were only a few people in the country who could drive like that, and they had to practice somewhere. It was only a matter of time until a lucky break turned up a loose part from one of the hijackings that traced back to a specific scene, a supplier for the racers there, a specific leader with a house full of drivers that everybody who talked about cars, talked about. 

Tanner had pushed hard, because Tanner always pushed hard for what he believed in, and while it meant that he lived life in a perpetual state of rage, he slept the undisturbed sleep of the righteous. Let him do this in a way that would mean something, he argued, come in with a scalpel instead of a hammer for once. What were they up to? Sure the FBI could sweep these racers off the street, but who was the leader and  _ what did they want _ ? No, this shit wasn’t normal, because  _ nobody stole things this way,  _ and they’d have to be watched while they didn’t know they were being watched. So the FBI agreed to a deep cover op and Tanner rode economy class on an early morning flight to the west coast, eating bagels out of a bag all the way to Seattle.

The LAPD was just grateful it would be out of their hands. Bilkins came along because he had to, but he spent the meeting staring fixedly out the window. Brian would have felt insulted but it was the LAPD, so contempt was like a compliment. He felt a vague sort of itch around his neck, like the phantom limb of the tie he was supposed to be wearing.

Brian bent over a tablet screen and Tanner watched him watch the footage the older man had already seen so many times. It was barely anything, really; a couple splices from dashboard cams, and one lucky shot from a CCTV with a good range and some streetlights to help out. Tanner could barely make anything out of it, just movement and chaos, but that didn’t matter. His job wasn’t to see how they did it, it was to get the guy who could see it.

“Tell me how you’d do this,” Tanner said, his fingers tearing at the last bagel, an onion bagel, scattering grains and crumbs across the cheap varnish.

Brian wrinkled his nose at the bagel and breathed through his mouth and let his gaze fall over Tanner’s shoulder, where the past sat waiting like a dog in the shadows, tailing him no matter how long he sat behind a desk and kept his hands full of coffee mugs instead of gearshifts. He saw the taillights of a Nissan GT-R, tasted dry Vegas air clear and bitter in March, the ground of a spinning planet tilting away from him in the wrong direction.

“I’d need to drive, really drive again,” he said, and Tanner nodded. 

“We’re prepared to put up some money in a confiscated frame and give you a budget for an engine-” he started, but Brian shook his head.

“At least two cars,” he said, ticking off with his fingers, “Maybe three. All with real racer engines, not that Orange County crap, and we’d need NOS in them, too, probably. Three months for me to get back in shape, so that means a track, somewhere far away. If they recruit at races, the cops will have to stop stopping the races now, let the scene build back up, give them time before I go under. And I’ll need to study the streets so I can have a prayer against the kids who grew up there. And even then,”

“We do all that, and tell me what you’d do,” Tanner repeated. He dipped the torn bagel into the coffee he’d gotten at gas station down the street, walking past three Seattle pour-over bars to do so. Brian winced at the sight, rubbed the back of his neck, and sighed.

“I’d do what I do, Tanner,” Brian said. “I can get in. Give me enough equipment, give me some time, I can figure out what makes them tick. Isn’t that why you’re here? Isn’t that why  _ I’m _ here instead of somebody who’s actually still allowed in the field?”

Bilkins might have made a sound at that point, but Tanner ignored him. He took his time finishing the coffee-soaked bagel piece and dusted his hands over the desk. But when he looked up at Brian again, there was no doubting the sincerity. 

“Tell me what you want for this, and you’ll get it.” 

Brian didn’t want to believe him, but he did, even though he knew that was the job, and he knew how it worked. But he felt it pull him like a magnet, that curl of excitement in his gut for everything he’d thought he could live without, and he had always been helpless against that feeling. Maybe this was a way to get it back, even for a few months, even as a lie. Brian took a deep breath. 

“You want me on this job, I want to be back in the field, and I want to drive again,” Brian said. “A clean start. A license, and the field so I can use it. Get me out of this damp hellhole, and back to Southern California.” 

“Done,” Tanner said so quickly Brian hadn’t even closed his mouth, but he also held up a hand. “If you do this job right, if you do it right Brian, then you’re back.”  

“Ok,” Brian said, and this time he didn’t even try to contain the joy that swept over his face. It wouldn’t be perfect, it wouldn’t be everything, but it was a start, closer to home than he’d been for the past three years. 

And with that, Brian turned his full focus to the job. He drummed his fingers on the side of the tablet. It was only for a second that he saw the black car, the way it rolled across the road like it was floating, all muscle and no weight at all. But a second was all he needed.  

“Even for me...” Brian said, “If Toretto is the guy in this car, well, I’ve never seen anyone drive like that, not even in Japan. There’s no one else in the world who can drive like that.” 

Tanner nodded. 

“ _ That’s _ why you’re here,” he said. “You know what you’re not. You don’t need to become Toretto, Brian. You need to become somebody Toretto trusts.”

 

* 

_ Now _

Brian stifled a yawn into the closest clean rag he could find, a white cloth uncharacteristically snowy in a garage where everything else was covered in some layer of grime, Brian included.  From underneath the car, another piece of the grime looked up.

“Are you serious?” Letty asked.

Brian shrugged defensively. “We’ve been working for six hours on this one fucking injection,” he said, but lightly, because Letty was his secret favorite, all claws and hisses and a butter-soft heart that nobody ever saw. Brian hadn’t seen it either, but his hypothesis was that it was there and that she would eventually de-prickle enough for them to sit together on the couch and watch  _ America’s Next Top Model  _ together. Letty could ogle the women and Brian could ogle their photographers. He had faith.

“Not the fact that you’re falling asleep on your feet because you’ve got no stamina when it counts,” Letty scoffed, “The fact that you just drooled all over Dom’s  _ particular _ rag.”

Brian looked at his hand. Five black streaks trailed from his fingers across the cloth.

“Of course it is,” he said weakly.

Letty scoffed again, one long shank of black hair falling across her cheek. On a gurney in loose-fitting camo, wrenches in both hands, face in a permanent scowl, Letty was still a pleasure to look at. For this, Brian graced her with a small smile despite the looming disaster that was his life as the one person in the house who seemed destined to get under Dom’s skin without even trying.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Letty said, “It’s not like Dom is obsessed with his things.”

Brian cast his eyes to the ceiling. He’d been learning over the past few weeks that for a man who seemed content to spend every Saturday night on his own front porch, Dom was particular about some things. He alternated between the same two coffee cups every morning, and parked in the same spot on the front right curb of the house. He wore his grey tank on Fridays, and his white one on Sundays. It was blasphemy to suggest switching from the sprouted wheat toast he’d been eating since approximately the stone age. If you got in between Dom and the most carmel-colored  _ corner piece  _ of Mia’s banana bread, he would glare a hole through you. If you took his parking spot, or otherwise interrupted the Sacred Toretto Routine, he would glare a hole through you. Not that Brian had accidentally found that out, multiple times. Dom didn’t seem to care about having a lot of things, but the things he had, he treated with a kind of gentle adoration that Brian could barely fathom.

And now the rag, of course the rag would be one of Dom’s  _ things _ . Brian chanced a glance over his shoulder. Dom was still bent over a XR-II, his head firmly engaged with the engine in some kind of heated philosophical debate about proper pump alignment. Brian smiled a small smile again and carefully threw the rag to land perfectly on the prop table on  _ Letty’s _ side of the car.

*

 

In undercover missions, things moved slowly until they didn’t. On race night, Brian decided that merely hanging around the market and trying to  _ intrigue people  _ wasn’t good enough, not for how the Torettos operated, not if they were the gang he thought they was. He’d have to become part of the family. The next day he discovered that Dom had a similar plan, and by the end of that week, Brian had a key to the famous garage. And if Tanner didn’t exactly know that Brian wasn’t spending much time in the shitty studio on top of Frank’s shop, well, what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. 

 

When Dom led him over the Supra that first morning in the garage, Brian was speechless. Dom stood on Brian’s left-hand side and leaned against a worktable, looking thoughtfully at the car. 

“I know we didn’t get to finish our race,” he said.

“Well, I won,” Brian interjected, and Dom paused to snort at the challenge-

“You wouldn’t have. But you can drive. Seems you’re also in need of a car, and once you have that car, a race. I like making investments in the community, so I thought you might work out of our garage.” It wasn’t exactly said like a question, which should have concerned Brian, but he was busy falling in love.  

Brian walked up to the Supra. It was in bad shape on the outside, at least, but his fingers itched to pop the hood and he couldn’t stay back any further. The engine looked like a solid base, something to start with, but they’d need at least 10k and then….well, Brian had some ideas. Expensive ideas. Somewhere on the inside, a lonely kid in South Dakota was clipping trees and playing with the wind in a field, spending his weekends at the junkyard and his nights in the old garage no one else bothered with. 

Brian trailed his fingers across the engine but resisted diving headfirst in then and there. He looked back at Dom, because what was it, really? What was he agreeing to? 

“Where did you get this? You got a race in mind, and you’re not the one driving it because...?”

Dom shook his head. “Requisitioned from a junkyard, I had some debt with the owner, who pulls too fast around a curve. Because I’m not. And I’ve got a race, I’ve got  _ the  _ race. You just make her fly, I’ll tell you where to point her.” 

Brian shrugged, because it was a Supra, because it was  _ Dom,  _ because if this wasn’t getting  _ in,  _ what was? “Ok,” he said, “I’m in. Let’s do it.” 

The Supra didn’t feel as beautiful to work on as it had under Brian’s hands at first touch. It was stiff, and had been left alone for too long, and the engine work was definitely going to need more time than Brian had initially estimated. But by lunchtime, he’d taken down a working list of parts to order and called in for a day off at Frank’s, because there was no way he was leaving his baby open in the garage without at least eight more hours in her. The engine was good and healthy, but it needed so much: NOS, a better ball-bearing turbo, and a boost controller at least. Brian put down the parts with input from Jesse, and resolutely decided to not think about where the funding was coming from for this overhaul, and whether it involved semi-trucks on long dark California highways. 

Nothing seemed out of the ordinary in the garage. Brian had to admit he wasn’t looking too hard, but he kicked at a couple of tarp-draped shapes that turned out to be tires, or boxes of hardware, nothing incriminating. And besides that, where were the cars he’d seen on the tapes? Black Civics, he’d guess, with heavy mods. Well, there was a car right in front of him that was just as interesting.

Leon wandered in and out, doing some routine maintenance, and Jesse continued working on designs at a computer workstation in the office that Brian would bet Dom had made for him. There was a desk at just the kid’s height, an ergonomic office chair, and a small pot full of succulents on the floor next to it. If you had a place in the Toretto world, Brian guessed, Dom would make sure you had a  _ place. _

Speaking of the devil, Dom worked with a single-minded focus on his Dodge in the front of the garage, under the brightest lamps. Brian tried to not feel offended at the way Dom left him to the Supra. There was something so hot and cold about Toretto, and it wasn’t that Brian  _ cared,  _ but the guy could say  _ something _ after he tracked down the one model of car that felt like Brian’s true home, brought him into whatever this racing family was. Some kind of orientation was in order, at least. 

Brian sighed, and dropped a socket, loudly. It clanged against the floor and Dom looked up, catching Brian’s gaze. Brian flushed and grabbed for the socket, knocked the sliding tool table over, catching his ankle against the Supra’s tire, and stumbling backwards into Leon. 

“Woah there,” Leon chuckled, bracing Brian neatly with one hand and saving a plate of sandwiches in the other. “Don’t destroy lunch.”    
  
“Yeah, drop Arizona, not Mia’s pulled pork,” Jesse said with some anguish, darting out of the office to grab the plate away. Brian shook his head and accepted the punishment of being the new guy in the garage, which was apparently the smallest and last sandwich. Even so, as he looked around the beautiful space with its beautiful cars, Brian felt more at home than he had in any space with other humans in it since before Vegas. 

*  

When Satoshi sashayed his way into Frank’s body shop later that week, Brian smelled trouble. He also smelled hair gel, Axe body spray, and an opportunity to net Frank a satisfying profit on overpriced acrylic urethane, which would make a nice subtle “thank you” for the three days off in a row that Brian had just taken. Of course, he wasn’t a real employee, and Frank wasn’t a real boss, and Frank was eventually getting immunity for his history of tax-free illegal imports in exchange for hosting the FBI, but Brian  _ did  _ leave a small business owner shorthanded. You gotta think local. 

Satoshi caught Brian’s eye, and scowled. He stalked up the counter where Brian was tabulating stock records, and rested his fist down in the middle of the paperwork, leaning over the counter. 

“Whatdya know,” Satoshi said, “Prodigy from the other night, here at Frank’s?” 

Brian looked down at the fist with an air of mild confusion, like it had sprouted there. He deliberately pulled the headphone jack out of his phone, and the glorious tones of  _ Beat It  _ floated tinnily through the air. Satoshi’s lip curled. 

“Can I help you?” Brian asked. “Maybe looking for supplies to spruce up the old paintjob?” 

“Don’t play cute with me,” Satoshi snarled. Brian blinked, because this was an inordinate amount of aggression even for someone whose baseline clearly needed some calibration. 

“Have we got a problem?” Brian asked, rapidly calculating whether there was any reason that they should, because Satoshi wasn’t even really a suspect in the files, a decent young driver but little to write home about other than a handful of disorderlies and (of course) some traffic violations. But Brian had an uncomfortable feeling under his skin that he was missing something, and Brian hated that feeling. It was never wrong. 

Satoshi drew back, and his fist came with him. The track switched to  _ Billie Jean,  _ and Brian considered it criminal that Satoshi didn’t show even a twitch of starting to bop along. It was  _ Billie Jean!  _

“Maybe I just don’t like the company you’ve been keeping these days,” Satoshi said.

Brian looked around the shop, where he and Satoshi were the sole people on the floor. “Not here, dumbass,” Satoshi said, like it physically pained him to have to spell it all out instead of speak in menacing obscurities, and getting angrier by the moment. Which was of course exactly Brian’s intention. He could push people away just as easily as he could pull them in, sometimes, and angry people said more. 

Brian crossed his arms over his chest.  _ Michael give me patience.   _

“We know what you’re up to,” Satoshi said.

“Oh no,” Brian said mildly, “Throws a real wrench into my saturday plans.” 

Satoshi’s face changed at that. “Saturday? Are you honing in on our turf?” He crowded the counter even more, and the zipper of his leather jacket dragged against the glass. 

Brian cast his eyes to the ceiling in silent prayer for all the young wannabe mobsters who couldn’t understand sarcasm. “Not that this isn’t fun,” he said, sweeping the stock reports up in one hand and flipping tracks on the phone with the other, “But honestly Satoshi, I really don’t know what you’re on about.”

“Yeah,” Satoshi sneered, “Then I’ve got a message for your  _ owner,  _ bitch. You run back and tell Toretto that if he tries coming into our territory again, or interrupts our run, he’ll pay. And,” Satoshi reached across the counter, grabbed the front of Brian’s tshirt, and yanked it forward. Or he would have, if Brian had let him, but some things were beyond even a deep cover persona--he wrapped his own hand around Satoshi’s wrist and brought it crashing back down on the counter. 

“Fuck you,” Satoshi said, but he was already backing up and heading out the door, taking a cloud of frustration and bodyspray with him. “Toretto made the wrong choice, you fucker, and you’ll fail him on the road, when it counts. I wouldn’t have.” 

And then it clicked in Brian’s head.  “So that’s what this is about,” he said, “What, you wanted in? Dom chose me that night, not you?” But Satoshi was already gone. What the fuck was that race then, some kind of audition?

Brian put his head down on the counter.  _ Smooth Criminal  _ floated over his head, and Brian had to stifle a hysterical giggle. A week of working on a junkyard car in a criminal garage, and he was already losing it, forgetting he didn’t belong there.  There was no way that confrontation was about racing. Satoshi and--whoever owned “our territory”--had given him the first real lead, and he had to follow it. 

Brian swallowed hard, an acid taste in the back of his mouth that usually preluded anxiety. He counted in time to the Jackson beat, and breathed, because Brian was going to  _ hold it the fuck together _ . This wasn’t about driving, or the way that working on a Supra again made him feel a frisson in his fingers, or the way he had already found himself counting down the minutes until he was back at the Toretto’s. This was about exactly one thing: finishing the job. And getting free.

Brian picked his head up from the counter and stopped the music. He stacked the stock report papers, picked up his jacket from behind the cashier’s stool, and made a mental note to apologize to Frank  _ again  _ as he headed out the door. Something was happening Saturday, and whether Satoshi’s crew or Toretto’s were behind the truck robberies, Brian had to find the evidence, and fast, because even Toretto good luck wears thin at some point. And maybe when he did, he’d figure out what came next. 

  
  



	4. Getting Leads

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brian goes looking for answers he's not sure he wants to find.

Contrary to stereotypes about undercover work, Brian had found that one of the best ways to get information is to just ask your target. People are surprisingly averse to lying when they’re not expecting it, and you can test just how far they trust you. Or maybe just how much they see you as too big an idiot to pose a threat, in Brian’s experience. Plus, Dom was the only one in the garage, so when Brian walked up to him and threw half a cup of water over his head, there weren’t going to be any witnesses to Brian’s gruesome murder.

“The fuck, Bri,” Dom growled, whipping around, and Brian tried for a second to remember why he thought that would be a good opening move, but it was difficult to think about that--think about anything--when Dom was right in his face, half-wet, half-mad, and Dom even half-mad was scary as fuck, but he was also laughing, which was delightful, and _focus, Brian._

“I picked up a message for you at the shop,” Brian said, backing up with his hands up, palms out to block any errant fists in case Dom was in that kind of mood. You never knew, these crazy car guys.

Dom didn’t back up, and stayed uncomfortably close, looked uncomfortably knowing, face too near Brian’s. Some gut intuition told Brian he’d crossed a line into physicality that wouldn’t be uncrossed, accidentally, recklessly went over thinking that he’d put Dom off his game. Didn’t count on feeling off his own game as a result.  

“What kinda message?” Dom said, arching an eyebrow, his momentary anger dying as quickly as it came.

Brian frowned at him, because he would neither be charmed nor intimidated by the god-damn eternal Toretto self-control.

“First, get a voicemail machine who doesn’t have a job; second _,_ Satoshi showed up today with a chip on his shoulder as big as the CenturyLink Tower and told me to tell you to get off their turf this saturday night, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean the track. Oh, and he insulted my driving skills, and I got the distinct impression that the race where I beat you--”

“Neither of us finished that race,” Dom corrected,

“—that it was some kind of, what? An audition? A setup? You wanted to scope me for some kind of _recruitment_?” Brian continued grimly.  

“Recruit me for what, Dom? What’s really going on?” Brian asked, gesticulating wildly with his cupless hand. “Why am I here? Why did you give me a car? What was Satoshi on about? Because if there’s a race on saturday, you sure as hell haven’t told us about it.”

Dom grabbed his hand out of the air, big fingers wrapped around Brian’s wrist, so warm.  “First, you spend a lot of time with your face in an engine in my garage for a guy with a job, and second, Satoshi is an asshole. I want you here because you’re the best driver I’ve seen in a long time, and I had a hunch. I wanted someone on my team who could win _in a race_ against these guys, and it’s gonna be you, Brian, because you’re the best. I’m not playing games with you.”

Dom’s voice echoed in the garage, had gotten louder through the speech, so much so that the garage felt hushed and tense when he finished. Dom released Brian’s wrist and dropped his own hand like he just realized he’d been holding it the whole time. Brian swallowed, and tried to figure out how to ask the real question, how to pitch the right tone of voice. How hurt should Brian Spilner feel having realized that he wasn’t trusted with the family’s secrets? Rhetorical question, of course. Brian O’Connor didn’t _actually_ feel hurt at the lack of trust, of course.

“Don’t treat me like an idiot,” he said quietly. “I know there’s more to this than some street race for a couple thousand every once in awhile. I know that your market doesn’t pay for these cars. I know drivers like you don’t get the respect that you have just from blowing smoke in the faces of assholes like Satoshi. Maybe I haven’t known you for that long, but I know _you,_ Dom. I don’t know what, but if you can’t tell me what’s really going on, why am I even here? How can I risk my life for you if you won’t even get real with me?”

Dom’s face had gone hard and shuttered, and Brian knew he was pushing it too far. But you don’t throw your entire life into a bet over a three second lead if you’re not willing to take risks, so he let his own frustration roll out, let go the self-control, just for _once_.

“So that’s how it is,” Brian snarled, “Fine. You might be used to everybody in the universe rolling over when you snap your fingers, but I don’t work that way. You want to work together, you want to ride, you tell me when you’re willing to let me the fuck in.”

And he turned on his heel and strode out of the garage, leaving Dom still standing silent in his wake.

*

Brian phoned in the encounter with Satoshi, and undoubtedly ruined somebody else’s day; Tanner spent fifteen minutes barking orders about background research and analysis work to get a handle on who the hell Satoshi was, and more importantly, who he was working for. The analysts came back by the end of a phone call with some educated guesses, mostly around drug trafficking, and Brian scowled at the phone, Tanner, and the world at large. The LA drug scene was ugly, brutal work, and he just couldn’t reconcile it with the family who squabbled over second helpings at dinner and which dumb tv show to watch after. But maybe the Torettos weren’t actually trafficking; he could hope they were at war with a local drug gang because of an old feud, because of a clipped fender in a race, because of something petty and stupid and personal. Criminals worked just like everybody else, after all.

Brian hung up the phone and walked back around the block he’d paced past to call Tanner. Making the call from the Toretto neighborhood was stupid, and he was stupid, and he should be back in his apartment or working in the shop, but he was too wound up to leave, or to stay, or to know where to put himself.

Brian trudged up to his car where he’d left it right behind Dom’s, and stood on the sidewalk looking up at the house. He had to admit it: he’d really started to believe the Torettos weren’t going to be at the heart of all this....whatever the FBI decided that it was, because it wasn’t even going to be his call in the end, not really. Even though Brian had heard the warning siren in his own head as soon as he saw Dom drive, knew himself well enough for _that,_ he’d somehow let this ridiculous house with its ridiculous family get under his skin. It was stupid, and he was stupid, and he’d better get his head on straight, go back to his fake home, take a pill or two, read a scifi novel, and he _was,_ he really was turning around and going, when his phone buzzed in his pocket.

_You wanna keep me company?_ Mia texted.

So Brian found himself  pulled up to the wide kitchen island, perched on a stool and resting his chin in his hands while Mia worked up a ginger sauce for some Asian fusion dish. Because Brian was a goddamn idiot, but the FBI didn’t have to know that yet. Not yet.

“I like this kind of thing,” Mia said, chopping, “Dishes where everything just goes together in one bowl, all the flavors at once. You just need a bowl and a spoon and you get a whole meal in each bite.”

Brian considered. “Like mac and cheese?” He offered.

Mia flicked half a snow pea at his face with a deft twist of the edge of her knife and Brian caught it between two fingers, reflexes snapping in reliably, trying not to think about Mia’s deftness and knives for too long. A few months of driving, and he was already feeling so much more like himself, seeing the edges and the motions in the world like he used to. Another thing that was going to vanish when the FBI descended.

“Dom likes mac and cheese too,” she said.

Brian scoffed. “It’s _cheese._ Who doesn’t like cheese?”

“Vince, actually, lactose intolerant,” Mia said, and she caught Brian’s eye, and they both laughed, and Brian felt just a little better about the world. Mia had a soft yellow light on over the sink and it shaded everything warmer than it was, an illusion, but Brian was willing to hold onto it for just another evening.

“I mean, Dom likes things that are straightforward. He’s sort of…” Mia said, getting right to the point in that Toretto way that Brian was never going to get used to, but he loved it anyway. She circled her knife in the air like she was trying to draw the right shape to circumscribe her brother. Brian knew the feeling.

“He’s focused, right? It’s like there’s no medium setting for Dom. He’s either totally focused on something, or not at all. So he likes to keep his world narrowed down to the things that really matter.” Mia frowned down at the snow peas, considering the right size for an even stirfry, and started chopping again.

“When dad died, and Dom got sent away, he changed. I mean I changed too, but Dom felt…responsible, and like he’d failed when I needed him,” she sighed. “He hadn’t you know? He made a mistake, but I’ve made plenty. And I forgave him years before he ever forgave himself. But it doesn’t matter. Since then, his whole life has been about making sure we’re taken care of. Sometimes, I think he’d feel responsible for the whole world if we let him.”

Mia was looking at the food, not at him, but Brian felt chastened nonetheless. All these weeks assuming that he was as focused on understanding the Torettos as anybody could be, and really, he’d just been so focused on his own place with them. Brian put his chin back on his fist and considered what this conversation was about, what Mia was trying to tell him here.

“I imagine,” he ventured, “You’d have to be careful about what you let into your world when you operate that way.” And he added it, fourth axiom to his mental list, the rule of Dom’s world born out of a loss he’d never really stop feeling. _Dom doesn’t let people down._

Mia looked pleased at him, and Brian felt simultaneously both deeply annoyed and deeply comforted, which was a common state of being for him when it came to Torettos. She put the knife down and leaned forward on the counter like they were sharing secrets.

“Don’t walk out on us, Bri,” she said softly. “Not yet. I know Dom can take a little time, but it’s worth it.”

Brian dropped her gaze and looked down at the floor, a sick feeling stabbing through him. Not because he doubted her, but because he believed her—and there wasn’t going to be a damn thing he could do about it, he was always going to walk out on them.

*

Brian put in overtime at Frank’s for the next five days, avoided Tanner’s questioning about the progress, and bought a six-pack in a valiant attempt to do what he thought bummed out guys were supposed to do, but gave up halfway through and switched to homemade lemon drops. Aside from a few texts with Mia about _The Dark Forest,_ which she was burning through at a pace that made him briefly crack a smile, he had no contact with the Torettos.

Ok, so maybe he was sulking. But the FBI didn’t have confirmation of Satoshi’s gang associations, and Brian knew that he was going to have to do his own digging if they didn’t want to blow this op. If he could find some hard evidence they’d have enough to do a raid, if he distanced from the Torettos he might get a broader view of the whole racing scene, if... Brian was laying on his couch and staring at the ceiling on Saturday morning, contemplating whether he should try to break into Satoshi’s garage tonight, when somebody knocked on the door.

“Jesus, Tanner,” Brian said, “I’ll have something for you when I—“ and the words died in his throat, because Dom Toretto was standing on his welcome mat.

“Uuh,” Brian said articulately, leaning slightly on the door. Dom didn’t try to come in, didn’t say anything, just looked earnestly at Brian and held out his hand. The Supra key sat in his palm.

“I finished her,” Dom said, and if Brian hadn’t known better, he would’ve sworn there was a note of hesitation in the other man’s voice.

Brian nearly swept the keys out of Dom’s hand, but held himself back. “Booster and all?” He asked skeptically.

Dom nodded. “Booster, injectors, balance, everything. She’s ready, and I thought you should be there for the first real ride.”

Brian waited, just long enough to make it clear that he could, long enough for Dom to shift his weight side to side. It would have been subtle for anyone else, but Brian was good at reading people, and for Dom Toretto, being even a little off balance was as good as an apology.

“So let’s drive,” Brian said. And Dom smiled at that, a warm smile that you could get used to; it crinkled the corners of his eyes in a way that Brian felt all the way through his toes.

The Supra was parked outside, an obscenely beautiful contrast to the rough street and cracked grey buildings. It had a new vivid orange paint job and a polish even, which alone would have taken Brian a week--the orange should’ve looked ridiculous, should’ve been too much, but it was bold and strong and hilarious instead, and it _felt_ like Brian.

Instead of leading the way to the car, Dom stood off to the side like he was waiting.  Brian met his eyes, and guessed that the pure glee on his face was enough to tell Dom that it was a good job, because the other man smiled with something like relief. Brian leaned forward, and Dom stilled for an instant--long enough for Brian to lift the keys out of his big hand and sidestep him around to the driver’s door.

Dom groaned, loudly. Brian smirked.

“You want to come or what?”

Dom slid into the passenger side. “Just don’t make me carsick,” he muttered.

Brian narrowed his eyes in mock anger, turned the nose of the car to the outside street--and they were flying.

The Supra felt like a dream, a very _specific_ dream, the one that Brian felt like he’d been chasing his whole life. He’d have to get under the hood later, but he already knew that Dom had taken his work and finished it exactly right, and it felt weirdly like mind-reading when the torque held at exactly his preferred level, the trade-off between handling and acceleration power was right where Brian would have put it.  He almost held his breath until he got them on the highway and out of the city traffic, and when the sides of the highway turned washed-out desert gold he gunned the Supra into her first leap. She shot easily past 100 and positively danced around the few cars on the road, and Brian almost wished that somebody would just try and get in their way.

Forty minutes slipped by before Brian even realized it and they were far south, sliding on and off the highway when Dom pointed out the exits that had long winding roads with interesting turns to try. Brian knew he shouldn’t, but he couldn’t help but picture Dom out here at seventeen, spending hours in whatever car his dad’s garage could spare, taking the turns again and again until they were second nature.

“Should we go back?” Brian finally asked, trying hard to not let the reluctance sound too obvious, but Dom tilted his head to the side.

“You hungry? Because I know a place in San Diego.”  

When they cleared the city limits Brian opened his mouth to ask for directions, but Dom reached right over from the passenger seat and easily took the wheel right out of Brian’s astonished hands.

“Don’t drive like a grandma, give me some gas,” Dom grunted, swerving the Supra around a truck and ignoring its outraged honks.

“Oh my god,” Brian said, “You are _such_ a control freak.”

“Learn to drive and I won’t have to be,” Dom said, and Brian rolled his eyes but pedaled, easily anticipating where Dom needed the gas and where he needed the brake, even without looking at the road.

They stopped for tacos at a hole in the wall in Ocean Beach, left the Supra with some stoners gawking at it around the corner. On Dom’s recommendation Brian got surf & turf tacos, and on Brian’s recommendation Dom got a horchata, which he’d somehow never had despite growing up in LA. This only cemented Brian’s belief that Californians never fully appreciated what they had.

Dom rolled his eyes, but then looked serious. “I wanted to say something about the other day,” he said slowly, and reluctantly, and clearly it was always going to take Dominic Toretto about five times longer than normal to talk about _feelings,_ but Brian waited patiently.

“You were right,” he said at last, words coming out slowly. “There’s more going on than I told you, more that we’re doing than the racing. I still want you for the race, but you’re right, there’s more.”

Brian swallowed a rising sense of panic, feeling the future closing in on him just a little too fast. “Ok,” he said, interrupting Dom, cutting him off, and cutting himself off from the confirmation that would change everything. “Ok. But look, I was wrong, too. I know I’ve still gotta earn it, you don’t have to tell me everything at once.”

“I appreciate that,” Dom said sincerely, and Brian felt like punching himself in the face. “Then let me just leave it at this, Bri,” and there was that note of hesitation again, like Dom was taking a second to calibrate for a particularly uncertain stretch of highway, hitting the curve with enough speed to keep the lead but not so much as to rocket off the edge into space—“I want you around, Bri. I want you with us.”  

“Yeah,” said Brian, unable to stop himself, unable to even pretend it was a lie anymore. “Yeah, me too.”

*

After they smoked the drive up the coast in under an hour, Brian had turned off at the Toretto’s exit without asking. He’d already decided that tonight, he’d check out Satoshi's garage, do some necessary digging, maybe shift the focus to where it really belonged, and until then, Brian Spilner could have a good dinner.

By twelve-thirty Brian had managed to put in a little bit of Letty-softening-up investment time, getting her to almost laugh with stories of his favorite deadbeat Vegas bars; he’d shown Leon the glories of Portal 2 on Jesse’s old xbox, and even Vince had come around to the lively living room, lured by the irresistible possibilities of endlessly killing his partner in a co-op. Brian had to admit, Vince was surprisingly good at the game despite his unchecked aggression problems, and Mia had stayed up, curled in her corner chair with a black-and-white blanket patterned like a checkered flag in what Brian was certain was an absurd joke. By one-thirty in the morning Brian easily slipped out the back door unnoticed, heading for the Supra and Satoshi's garage.  

“Couldn’t wait to take her out again, huh?” Dom detached himself from the shadows on the side of the house and Brian jumped at least a foot and a half in the air. Dom didn’t even try to look repentant.

“Thought I’d head home,” Brian said, but without a lot of conviction. Dom put his empty Corona down on the porch steps and walked over to the Supra.

“You know,” the big man said slowly, “I feel like this new honesty thing between us could go both ways.”

Brian looked down at the key in his hands, and back up at Dom. Maybe it was too many tacos in his system, or the way that Dom had managed to even make sure that the trim on the Supra was finished before he came back to Brian to apologize, but Brian found himself right back in that _what the hell_ place that had been such a problem for the entirety of his existence. He swung the passenger door open on the Supra and tried not to look _too_ inviting, and failed.

“Satoshi said to stay out of their way on Saturday,” he said, “So I thought, they won’t be in their garage tonight, will they?”

*

Satoshi’s garage was set right off the road, wreathed in landscaping, and had a carriage-style driveway that split around a god-damn _fountain._ Brian had to hold in a laugh. Just when you think these guys couldn’t possibly get any more full of it, they reach new heights of creative douchebaggery. He pulled the Supra off the road and around a tight corner while barely touching the brake at all, slid her neatly to the side of the garage where an alley opened up between the garage itself and the towering house that rose up behind it. Dom didn’t protest, but Brian could feel the other man’s body tense.

Brian cocked an eyebrow, and because Toretto may be the king of the streets but _Brian_ was the king of cheesy pickup lines, he couldn’t help himself: “What, surely you knew think I was good for more than a fast, straight ride, didn’t you?”

Dom snorted. They left the Supra there and Brian found an easily pickable window, dropped lightly through it to the concrete garage floor, and smirked at Dom, who muscled his uncomfortable way through the same window.

Dom went straight for the cars, which Brian knew he would -- reconn for this mysterious race -- and popped the hood on a Civic coup. Brian quietly put a Nissan in between himself and Dom, and started skirting the edges of the room. A shadowy bundle underneath a tarp caught his eye, towering halfway to the ceiling of the tall room. Brian glanced over his shoulder, but Dom was buried in the engine, scoping out the mods, so he squatted down in front of the bundle and cautiously lifted the tarp’s edge.

Electronics. Brian heard his own heartbeat pound in his ears, started counting somewhere in the back of his mind to make sure he kept the cool. Boxes and boxes of goods, enough to fill up at least half a semi, he estimated. He slid his phone out and took a couple of silent photos for later examination, captured some serial numbers on the boxes that hadn’t been removed yet. Sloppy, sloppy work. Brian swallowed down his glee, rocked back on his heels, and looked up at the ceiling gratefully. He’d finally found the incontrovertible lead, and it wasn’t in the garage that he wanted to come back to.

“This is giving us some good ammo, right?” Dom’s voice made Brian jump for the second time that night, and he cursed quietly and dropped the tarp, but Dom was still looking at the Civic and hadn’t turned around. Brian walked back around the side of the garage and stepped out of the shadows and into Dom’s flashlight glare.

“Jesus,” Brian said, scoping the empty engine box that Dom was examining, like the car was open for surgery. Lord only knew what Satoshi was planning on putting in there, but he hadn’t expected the hothead to be building a crazy hybrid, Jesse-style. For a second he forgot about the job, saw tail lights in the distance in front of his face, and felt nothing more urgent than a heady rush of predatory rage at the idea of _losing._ They couldn’t _lose._

“This asshole isn’t Satoshi,” Dom said, and his face was grim. Brian blinked for a second, but before he could ask, a whirring outside the garage sent them both scrambling back out the window, and into Supra to take off for home.

This plan was abruptly thwarted by the menacing group standing in the street outside the house. Seven or eight guys on bikes, all armed, and they circled the Supra like wasps. Brian braked hard.  

“The owner of the Frankenstein civic, I assume?” Brian asked.

Dom’s lips twitched and he opened his mouth and against all wisdom and high on the adrenaline, Brian found himself looking at it, leaning towards him as irrevocably as a magnetized socket. Thankfully, life intervened in the form of a pleather-clad gangster strutting up to the passenger door and tapping on it with the nose of his semi-automatic, so they got out of the car instead.

Because he was Dom, Dom strode around to stand face to face with the group’s leader instead of waiting with the car in between him and _men with guns_ , and Brian gritted his teeth and wondered what Brian Spilner would do, because Brian O’Connor, trained field agent, was having a damn hard time taking the protected position. Dom had a gun, which was reassuring, although what wasn’t reassuring was how he’d pulled that from somewhere in the Supra without Brian even noticing. _Brian_ didn’t even have an earpiece, because _Brian_ was an idiot. He stalked up behind Dom, stood on the right and put the car keys in between his knuckles, like that was gonna help.

“What’s the problem, Tran,” Dom said.

“Thought we had an agreement,” Tran said, “You stay away, I stay away? Everybody stays happy.”

_Johnny Tran,_ Brian rifled frantically through his mental notes, but came up short. Just another driver, better than most, not better than all. Satoshi was definitely skulking in the background, so this must be the leader of the younger gang.  Tran stood in the street like a cartoon villain, legs spread arrogantly wide, dressed in a black tshirt and pleather pants. Brian thought he looked just dumb enough to be really dangerous. Brian made a mental note, because where Tran’s family was rich enough, it didn’t seem likely that they’d outfit all their son’s friends, too--another point in favor of Tran’s gang being the thieves, and Brian felt strangely giddy despite the precarious situation.

“Everybody can still be happy,” Dom said. “Brian, my new mechanic. Meet Johnny Tran, long-time friend.”

Tran grinned in a way that said _friend_ could only really mean _rival_ or _ex_ or, hey, maybe both. Brian hoped to god it wasn’t both, but knowing Dom, no guarantees.  

“Charmed,” Tran drawled, “Charmed.” Tran kicked the front tire of the Supra, and Brian tried not to look offended.

“Cute trim,” Tran said dismissively, and Brian’s fist tightened on the keys, but Dom laughed.

“Just thought I’d give you something to keep from being bored next month,” he said. Tran came back around the car and into Dom’s personal space, and Brian tried not to look offended again.

“Is that why you decided to pay us a visit, check out my new place?” Tran said quietly, menacingly. In the background, two of his henchmen circled close, hands on their weapons too. Brian felt the tension pull so tight that one wrong move might snap it.

“Bored and trying to stay out of trouble this weekend,” Brian said, clear and loud enough that Satoshi would hear it, and indeed, he scowled in the background. Brian winked at him.

“How about a pilot test, then?” Brian asked brightly, stepping blithely in between Dom and the guns, channeling all the reckless, confrontational energy that Brian Spilner could deploy. “Let’s race, just a quick nightcap.”

Tran cocked his head to the side and Brian held his breath, but then the other man shrugged and slid his weapon back into its absurd thigh holster.

“Why not,” Tran yelled, and his goons piled back on their bikes, “It’s a straight quarter mile run across the tracks, Toretto, you know this one, I think?”

Dom shot Brian a look that he would have to interpret later, something halfway between irritation, surprise, fondness, and a suspicion that Brian hoped didn’t go too deep. But a race was better than a shootout, so Brian tossed Dom the keys and tried not to feel too unnerved as the cadre of motorcycles buzzed around them, herding the Supra out the driveway and onto the road. Satoshi slid right up against the passenger side window and flipped Brian off, so Brian blew him a kiss for good measure.

Brian practically _saw_ Dom switch gears into race mode, like every muscle in his body relaxed and re-aligned. He pressed himself into the passenger seat and breathed into the pit of his stomach, because even though Dom Toretto was the only driver he’d consider tolerating for a ride along, he didn’t have to like it. The road stretched flat and beautiful in front of them, the quarter mile ending at a train track gleaming under the moonlight. Tran beckoned some henchman forward, and the guy raised a black-gloved hand in the air to count down from five fingers.

Brian had never driven against bikes before, and it was immediately a head game. Tran’s men hemmed the Supra, making him nervous. They could only compete with a car in a short track like this, but since this was more of an ego parade than an actual street race, Brian supposed it didn’t matter. Dom took the start slow and mellow in the signature Toretto style, easy as syrup over Mia’s pancakes despite the bikes batting around them. He hit the gas quickly, though, the engine revving in a way that made Brian feel proud, _his car,_ still couldn’t really believe that he was here instead of dreaming about this as he fell asleep at a desk in Seattle.

The road was smooth and fresh and lit beautifully by warm California moonlight, so they were past a hundred faster than Brian could breathe. Predictably, Tran had the best bike mods and was keeping pace even as his minions dropped off, burning their engines out or just too skittish on the crowded road. All talk and no guts, typical. Satoshi was still there, still yelling insults or whatever else got him off. It didn’t matter, because they were going to hit the train track easy, and Dom shot him a liquid look full of glee and it was worth it, for a second, to be a passenger, if Dom was the one driving.

And then everything went to shit. Red lights cut through the blue moonlight, pulsing on the tracks ahead of them. Metal train wheels whistled so loudly Brian heard them even through the Supra windows going past a hundred miles an hour. Some of the gang veered off, splitting across the oncoming lane and pulling out into the dirt, but Tran and Satoshi hung on, flanking either side of the Supra and forcing them straight down the road to the tracks. They were going to hit the train head-on.

Brian saw it on Dom’s face, for just an instant, the consideration: he could pull the car heavily to the side, spin Tran off the bike and injure, or maybe kill him, but they would get off the road and drive harmlessly to the side of the tracks. Brian could see it all laid like a jump start on the future, taste the NOS in the back of his throat and hear the shattered metal crunch underneath his heels, just like Vegas. Before he could even open his mouth to start saying _don’t,_ Dom had tilted his chin up, punched the gears, slammed the Supra against the edge of its acceleration and fucking _shot for it_ \-- the Supra roared straight over the train tracks, a millisecond away from collision. The red and white track barrier screeched across the windshield, and the Supra slammed hard into the road on the other side of the tracks, red sparks flying, and they’d made it. Tran and Satoshi pulled off just before the tracks, spinning their bikes into the dirt and Satoshi got flung off carelessly, like a rag doll in the desert dirt, but they were both alive.

Brian laughed out loud with the sheer, fucking, brilliant _joy_ of it, and then a semi-truck slammed into the passenger side of the Supra, and the world went black.


	5. Getting Wrecked

Later, Mia would scoff at the idea that Dom would _ever_ renovate a Supra without reinforcing the damn flimsy sides so it wouldn’t crumple like an old piece of tinfoil. She’d say it over her shoulder with an arched eyebrow and a rolled eye, like you should’ve expected that, like Dom Toretto was going to let anybody whip the track in a Supra without insurance. He was a careful guy, overly careful, ridiculously careful, and didn’t Brian know that by now?

Later, Brian found out Dom had already started turning the Supra as they spat across the train tracks. Brian had missed it, but Dom saw the semi _while_ they were clearing the tracks. It was a moment when nobody should’ve been able to see anything, rightly, but it was Dom, so. They rocketed hard left and burnt tires and axles and even managed to drift, skidding against a fortunate piece of the train track barrier. Not enough to keep them from being hit, but enough.

Later, Brian would find out how lucky he was. He found out that when Dom wrenched the car hard to the left, his own head went right, too hard and too far into the window or the top of the doorbar, but still, the skull is a strong thing and Brian was held back by the swinging force of the car turning.  They got lucky with the semi driver, too. She was tired, pulling a double and driving slow, distracted enough by the train to see the nose of the Supra and jolt wide awake, slam on her own brakes. She’d been driving around the LA sprawl with a rumor in the back of her mind about dark cars on a dark road in those weird hijackings, the ones that the shipping companies wouldn’t talk about and the drivers couldn’t stop talking about. Maybe that helped too, made her just a little more ready to see racers appear out of nowhere.

Later, so, so much later, Brian found out just how bad that moment had been for Dom, like the world had bottomed out for a second time in exactly the way he’d always promised himself he’d never let happen again. He found out that Dom saw accidents coming the way the best drivers saw openings; like he was waiting for them.

But all that was later. Now, Brian sensed the probing fingers of consciousness like a toddler tugging uncomfortably at his body. He felt the roof of his mouth first, dry and clamped, and his tongue too big for it. There was an unpleasant shimmer further away from the mouth, perhaps somewhere in the limb region, but there Brian’s sense of his own body and the world around it blurred together, and he shelved it as a problem for _future Brian_. The sucker.

“Come on now,” said a voice, and it was a good voice, the best voice. Brian could’ve rolled around in that voice. “Stay with me, Brian. Stay with me.”

Brian fired a synapse in the direction of a thought about making a noise, but that chain of command didn’t quite have all its links up yet. Something must have stirred anyway, because the voice sounded relieved. “You’re all right,” the voice said, and sure, everything was all right, Brian believed it. “Just hold on, I’m getting you out, you hold on.”

Consciousness was fully on its way now, and Brian had the perception of _car_ around him but arranged in a way that _car_ usually wasn’t. The tugging of consciousness turned to actual tugging, and Brian opened his eyes in time to see Dom’s arms come around him and gently untangle something that probably belonged to Brian from something that probably belonged to the Supra. He closed his eyes again, because hey, _future Brian._

“Stay with me,” Dom repeated. Brian flapped a hand at his arm in annoyance, which was a fucking terrible idea. “Fuck,” he said in confirmation, eyes firmly closed. His head pounded and his arm felt wet but his faculties otherwise seemed fine, so the world could just stay away. Dom pulled air in between his teeth in a slow hiss.

“You wanna go to the hospital?” Dom asked quietly. Brian blinked his eyes open at that and Dom’s face swam into view, so, so close to his. Not the worst way to wake up, then. “No,” he said firmly, “No.”

“Yeah,” Dom said with a weak chuckle, to which Brian nodded slightly. Dom got it. “Lucky for you,” he said, still quiet, deliberate, like he was convincing himself and not Brian—“The cut’s not deep, just needs a wrap. I’m gonna guess you’ve got a concussion, but you only blacked for a second, if you’re sure you don’t wanna go to a hospital—”

“What have I told you about listening to me,” Brian announced, firmly closing his eyes again.

“Ok,” Dom chuckled again, “Ok, Letty will be here in ten, we’ll go to yours.”

“Hm,” Brian said. There was that damn earpiece again that Dom seemed to always have, or maybe it was a panic button in the car, either way, not the usual equipment for a street racer. _Tran,_ he reminded himself, _it’s Tran, not Dom. Saw the parts myself. Took the pictures. On my phone._

“Wait, no, _wait,”_ Brian said urgently, eyes snapping open, flailing out and back towards the Supra. Dom’s face looked torn between exasperation and tenderness, and a traitorous part of Brian’s mind thought, _we could get used to that face._

“It’s ok,” Dom soothed, “Come on, we’ll fix it, Letty will get it, come on Bri—”

“ _NO,”_ Brian screeched, and he staggered out of Dom’s guiding arm and back into the car. It only took about two seconds before he felt Dom’s hands come around his waist to firmly hold him against any further injury, and Brian couldn’t resist rolling his eyes even though in his heart of hearts, it was delightful. Brian found his phone rolled underneath the passenger seat and he pulled it out triumphantly, risking only a small glance at the back of the Supra while he did so. It looked twisted bad but maybe, maybe it was superficial, and it was a kick in the stomach, but surely they could fix it.

Dom hauled Brian bodily out of the car again with his mouth in a thin line, held him tight. Brian caught a blurry glimpse of the semi truck driver, sitting on the curb waiting for the cops. Brian consoled himself with the thought that Satoshi and Tran were probably at home with their feet up on the electronics that Brian was gonna nail them with, and surely that was worth a bang-up.

“Ready to go,” Brian said brightly and, he hoped, urgently, because, cops were bad. He knew that. He pretty much was a cop.

“You needed your phone?” Dom asked incredulously. Brian smiled beatifically into his face and jabbed a finger into Dom’s chest with the hand that didn’t hurt.

“You can’t even imagine,” Brian said, “How much music I’ve got saved on this phone.” He jabbed again. For emphasis.

Dom gave him a narrow-eyed glare. “You’re concussed, you fucking idiot,” he said.

“But _rhythmic,”_ Brian said, and tried to shimmy, and immediately threw up on them both.

*

Things flickered a bit but Brian figured the only thing for it was time. He’d had a concussion once or twice, been in an accident once or twice, knew this floating sensation that was mild shock.

Letty picked them up and maybe Leon or Vince or Mia was there, Brian couldn’t tell you, somebody started picking up pieces of the Supra— _baby,_ he’s vaguely sure he said, _it’ll_ _be ok baby_ —Brian blinked and they were in Brian’s kitchen, sitting at the table, and everything felt so normal for a second that he almost asked if Dom wanted something to drink. But then he blinked and felt the warm wetness down his arm, _right, right, we were in an accident,_ and a gentle padding kind of pressure.

“Keep talking to me, Bri,” Dom said calmly. Brian thought his voice sounded like the key turning in an ignition, a rolling growl that meant something was about to happen. A voice like that could turn more than an engine on, in Brian’s opinion. Brian told Dom this.

“Sure,” Dom said with a smile, or Brian assumed he did, because it _sounded_ like a smile, but the whole kitchen was a little blurry. But Brian could still clearly imagine the exact moment Dom’s face went from solid and unyielding to mischievous and warm, transformed by that half-smirk in the corner of his face.

“You’re ok,” Dom said, “Now stay with me, this might hurt.” And he was doing something steady and careful down Brian’s arm, and it did hurt, but Brian wasn’t interested in dwelling on it.

“I’m tough,” Brian said, and he was only joking, but Dom glanced at him thoughtfully. “I know you are,” Dom said gently, “More than you let on, probably.”

Brian might have flushed, but luckily he felt too shitty and too disoriented to tell.

“Keep telling me why you came to LA,” Dom said, “Unless it was just trying to meet me. Or if that’s it, tell me anyway.”

Brian scoffed. “I know that this is hard to imagine, but not _everything_ is about the Torettos.”

“Sure,” Dom repeated with a smile that only got bigger, “Just most things.”

His arm stung with disinfectant, and Brian looked away from the table and down at the linoleum floor. Brian mostly ignored this kitchen at the back of his studio apartment, like he’d ignored every kitchen in every FBI studio he’d ever been in. He wondered just how many hours he’d spent ignoring rooms like these, living a fake life in a fake home. It was a terrible floor, a faded yellow with dingy grey spots to disguise dirt and stains, nothing like the clean, bright blue tiles in Mia’s kitchen. Brian loved that kitchen, he realized, he loved everything about it.

“I came to LA because I had a chance to start driving again,” he answered honestly.

“And I missed it more than anything in the world. I just...I was in a bad place. In Seattle, well, before Seattle. For a while, I hadn’t been driving. For a while, I was just, stuck.”

Dom continued working over the arm, somehow encouraging with silence. Brian _liked_ how quiet Dom was. Every guy, and the occasional girl, in Brian’s past was so loud, had taken up so much space in the room. It felt right at first--because Brian needed someone who could push back when he pushed out, needed someone who felt speed like he did, moved fast enough to see the spaces instead of just the collisions, needed to know that they weren’t _breakable_. But somehow, that loudness always got unbearable. Eventually, Brian couldn’t even hear himself think until he got on his own again.

Not like Dom. With Dom, the words just seemed to spill out of Brian. There was probably something he should probably be holding back right now, but for the life of him, he couldn’t tell what it was.

“It’s all, well. You might think this is the first wreck I ever been in,” Brian said woozily.

Dom laughed.

“Trust me, I did not think that,” Dom said. Brian swatted at the big man’s arm with his uninjured hand. He seemed to be doing that a lot, tonight, his limbs with a mind of their own. Probably the shock.

“Didn’t even flinch,” Brian muttered resentfully.

“I’ve had worse,” Dom said with an air that Brian thought must be smugness. He settled for a low kick at Dom’s feet under the table, to which Dom retaliated by clamping his own foot down, hard, on Brian’s, and easily held it down against the shitty linoleum floor. Brian shouldn’t find that so interesting. He cleared his throat and made a face and put his foot back where it came from.

“I am _injured,”_ Brian said, with dignity. “You should be _careful.”_

“Move your mouth since you gotta move,” Dom drawled, concentrating on Brian’s arm still. “I swear to god, antsiest driver I ever met, Bri.”

“Ok,” Brian said, “Why did I come here?” He drummed his uninjured hand and looked up at the ceiling, but it was no better than the floor.

“I used to think that I knew what I wanted, before Seattle,” Brian said, “And it was just to get away, and then when I got away, it was to win. I thought I was the best driver to ever show up in Vegas, and you know, for a while I was.”

Dom reached to his left and pulled some gauze out of the small medkit that he’d found in Brian’s kitchen. Brian looked at it for a second because he couldn’t remember when Dom had gone through the cupboards. Or when they’d sat down at the table, really. But he noticed that Dom kept one hand steady on Brian’s left arm, just holding it and keeping contact while he rummaged for the gauze with the other. It was grounding, so Brian kept talking.

“The thing is that nobody stays the best for long,” Brian said. “And I’d built my whole life around it, you know? It was the only way I got out of the dead-end town I grew up in. I thought it would be nice to never see another winter, maybe.” And the desert had a certain magic to it, with its wide, flat plains. Stars pulling so fast and clear over the roof that you made a new Milky Way every time you raced.

“I’ve never lived anywhere else,” Dom said. “We grew up here. Winter sounds like a piece of ass though.”

Brian laughed. “You’d probably just do ice drifting or something, invent some new sport. But yeah, not a lot of garages back home. Not a lot of people with patience for some manic kid who kept breaking speed limits and other people’s bumpers.”  

“So you found your way to Vegas. And what happened there?” Dom asked. But the way he asked made Brian feel like he already knew, and he liked that about Dom, too. Except that where Dom might be imagining Brian learning cars, working in body shops, there was someone who had Tanner’s job leaning over a coffeeshop table and telling him that he could still drive, that he could live the double life he was already so good at, and get paid for it. Maybe even help people, sometimes, do all that and drive. It had even felt like a path, for a while.

Brian sighed, and winced, because Dom was doing something that felt too clinical for comfort. Dom had reassured him that the gash wasn’t bad enough to need stitches, but it did need the right wrap or it would heal ugly. Something he’d learned from Mia, he said. Brian could only hope that the Supra wouldn’t heal ugly, either.

“I lost control,” Brian said, because, well, because it was the truth, and Dom had asked. “I thought I could balance everything, and I gambled on my own god-damn ego, and I lost. And somebody died.”  

Brian licked along his bottom lip, bone-dry from the crash. It blended in his head sometimes, when he got shaken up enough, and he wondered whether he’d ever really walked away from that desert or if he was still there, wheeling under those stars. When the nights in Seattle got too dark and too long, when the job made him scared. And sometimes it happened for no reason at all—a screech on the road that sounded like metal, turbulence on an airplane, a panic attack that the meds couldn’t stave off, whatever it was that made his heart melt in his chest and drip down around his intestines. The job, the drive, the most solid things in his life had melted around him that night, like a metal frame gone liquid in a crash. Whatever it was, it had healed ugly.

Dom’s hand was still steady on Brian’s arm, and he moved it to an uninjured part and squeezed, slowly and delicately. He might have been checking for a break, or he might not have been.

“You know it’s not your fault,” Dom said gently. “We all know what we sign up for when we drive.”

Brian looked at Dom, glassy-eyed across the table. He was woozy, and he wasn’t sure that he was really in his right mind, but meeting Dom’s solid gaze felt like the most important thing he could do, like making sure he _understood_ this was all that mattered.

“Some of us know better,” Brian said.

And it was his fault. Three months embedded uncover in Vegas, Brian had given front money and tasked with instigating a race that the LVMPD were going to use to grab a local drug runner in a race bust without alerting his normal chain of command, someone with enough contacts to help the FBI close a west coast drug ring. And a race was the perfect way to do it, but the route was wrong. Brian knew it was wrong, but they’d insisted on it because there was a narrow canyon that the LVMPD wanted to use for their ambush, had it all mapped out. And Brian should’ve known better, should’ve found another way, but he didn’t, and the cars had scattered through the dust in a tight-init panic, pulling together and apart in a matter of seconds. Brian was a good enough driver to get out, but a nineteen-year-old kid from Mesquite wasn’t. Luis Medina, who had three little sisters back home, and sent them a hundred bucks from his paycheck every two weeks. More, when he won a race.  

Dom had held his gaze but then he looked down, deft fingers tapping his arm, finishing the gauze with tape, pulling Brian back into the present. His arm was wrapped in a neat bandage, all ugliness packed away behind white. It would hold for now, and maybe that was all you could ask for.

“I’m not gonna disagree with you,” Dom said, slow and careful. “But it’s still not your fault.”

He said it with certainty, more certainty than Brian had ever felt in his life, about anything. “I know I can’t just tell you that, I know you gotta find your own way. But it’ll get easier.”

And the weird part of it all was that Brian almost believed him, even though Brian knew better than anybody what it meant to try to make things true with words alone. But this man had felt his own world melt before he hit twenty-five, had rebuilt it into something different and special and protected. Brian liked the way things felt in Dom’s world, a place for everything, no rules but loyalty. You didn’t have to forget the past in that world, but you could set it down on a shelf in the garage, do something with your hands for a while.  

Dom pulled his hand down from Brian’s arm and let it rest on top of Brian’s, and in another state of mind, Brian might have been more on guard against the weirdness and the intimacy of that and pulled back. But he didn’t. He let himself enjoy it, the way that Dom could just pull him back from the dark without any effort at all. Dom made the hardest things look easy, and you couldn’t even look away while he did it. Brian spread his fingers minutely against the table grain even though it made his arm burn, just to feel the soft drag of Dom’s skin on top of his. Dom curled two fingers in a gentle back-and-forth across Brian’s knuckle.

“Everybody’s got a path,” Dom said. “At some point or another, everybody’s got a crash.”

“And we’re glad yours brought you here. Mia and me, but everybody else too, Leon and Jesse, and even Letty and Vince, although they won’t say it except when you do something ridiculous on wheels. But they are, we all are.”

Brian opened his mouth, and closed it, because he couldn’t pretend he was still as woozy as he wished he was, couldn't pretend even a concussion was enough to say _I’m glad too_ and _keep me_ and _for god’s sake, make it last._ So he pulled his arm away and inspected it. Dom pulled his own hand off the table and into his lap, and Brian felt the loss in the cold air on the top of his hand and wondered if he’d just deflected something important, one of those turns that change a race, left, or right.

But Dom just leaned back and smiled, and the moment was over but it was ok. He gestured to the glass of water that had appeared next to Brian at some point during the proceedings.

“Drink that. Now, do you wanna go to the hospital and get that concussion checked out?” Dom asked. Brian snorted. Hospitals meant Tanner, and Bilkins, and a whole mess of things that Brian could do without tonight. It was five in the morning or worse, and his head hurt and his muscles ached.  

Dom cocked his head to the side like he was considering.

“Headache? How’s the vision?”

Brian held up his hands. “I’m fine, Mom, just give me Letty to lift the equipment for a couple days, although if you’re offering, I’d take a couch in the garage. Put wheels on it and I can even get under the Supra without standing up.”

Dom laughed again, even though Brian was pretty sure he wasn’t that funny. “I’ll get ice, and you should lay down. Unless you wanna go back to our place?”

Brian forced himself to swallow down the cold water despite a lingering nausea. “Putting me back to work so soon?”

Dom made a _tsk_ sound that reminded Brian excessively of Mia the one time he tried to cut onions for her. “Not gonna leave you alone tonight. Your place or mine, Spilner?”

Brian gave him a loopy smile. “You say that to all the men whose cars you crash,” he said, which was a bad idea, the _worst_ idea, but he was so far past deciding what was going to come out of his mouth.

And Brian couldn’t regret it because Dom smiled back down at him, came around to his side of the table, wrapped a strong arm around his waist, and pulled him up.

“Couch time, then, busted Brian,” Dom said, like he was some kind of funny person, and he repeated himself softly as they walked to the couch, _god,_ “Buster Brian.” Brian rolled his eyes as hard and as pointedly as he could, but the effect was somewhat lost as he shuffled along. God but Brian was _tired_. He didn’t really need to lean on Dom, but then again, it was only good common sense to not take a risk when the floor was moving so much. Good common sense, and also how good Dom smelled, which was surprising for someone who had just been driving so much and in such stressful circumstances, god dammit.

The bed in the corner of his studio felt better than Brian remembered, so good that the second he hit it, his eyes started shutting. He felt a sheet thrown over him and Dom settling somewhere off on the right, in the chair that Brian knew wasn’t anything as comfortable as the chairs in the tv den back home. _Torettos’,_ he corrected, _not home._ There was a click and a fuzz of static as the tv that Brian never used turned on. Figures that they’d go through all that, and Dom wouldn’t even be tired.

“Good night, Bri,” Dom said, “Don’t look at anything.” And for once, it was easy to obey.

*

Brian swiped through the photos to check that they’d all uploaded securely onto the FBI link, serials, Tran’s face, Satoshi’s stupid motorcycle. It would be more than enough to launch a raid. He thumbed off the screen and rubbed a hand over his eyes. He was feeling pretty ok, all things considered, but a lingering headache meant that avoiding screens of all kinds was probably a good idea. Maybe another drive down the coast in the California sunshine was what he needed. Maybe after the raid this op would wrap, and Tanner would definitely approve a couple weeks off for recovery. Deep cover ops required a lot of decompression for the agents who go through them, and Brian felt like he’d earned some beach time.

Brian could lie and say he wasn’t scheming, somehow, to bring Dom into his eventual vacation, work the Supra out in time for this mysterious race together, but hey, what was the point? He felt, somehow, absurdly, like he could figure this whole thing out.  Brian had woken up deep into the next day with a sense of calm etched right into his bones. Normally, after a wreck….well, this wasn’t normal. Instead, Brian had stared at the ceiling for a good ten minutes trying to go over last night’s conversation and chastise himself before giving it up as a useless exercise, because all he could think about was the vague sense he’d had early that morning of Dom tucking the sheets in around him again.

Dom was already gone when Brian woke up for good, but he’d left a note on Brian’s kitchen table to say he needed to get to work, that he had already called Frank to let him know Brian wouldn’t be in, and that Brian would be expected at the Toretto’s whenever he woke up. _DRINK WATER_ was in all caps at the bottom, underlined. Brian had looked from the note to the three glasses of ice water on the kitchen table, and grinned like an idiot.

The photos uploaded and about twenty seconds later, Tanner’s confirmation buzzed in his hand. Raid then, tonight probably. Brian did a slow victory shuffle out into his living room, complete with arm jabs at the ceiling which rolled right through the sore muscles in his shoulder, but were worth it. He’d never felt happier to be nearing the end of an op. Despite the clusterfuck that he’d made of his life with the _Dom Torretto Situation,_ the sick feeling that had made a home in the bottom of his stomach was gone. It wasn’t them, it was Tran, maybe they ran illegal street races and maybe they were a pain in the LAPD’s backside but they weren’t the fucking bad guys, the FBI’s Most Wanted headed for the long lockup and the slow slide to the bottom of society. They were gonna be safe. Brian kicked the volume up on Gaga and wailed along, making tiny kicks at the carpet. _Damn,_ but he was good at his job.

*

Brian wandered into the garage around four o’clock, awake after a second nap and feeling pretty ok, but hoping against hope that Mia would rise to the occasion with some recovery snacks. He felt like he deserved it.

“Hey Bri!” Jesse called from his workstation. The kid was bent over some blueprints and annotating with a microline--Brian had seen four separate pen sets around the house, they seemed to spontaneously appear in Jesse’s wake but lord knew, Dom wouldn’t let you use them.

“You here to check on the Supra?” Jesse asked. Brian actually wasn’t, which was a surprise to realize, but he wheeled around and breathed a sigh of relief when he saw it pulled safely into the front jack spot. Dom’s spot, he noticed, the one with the best lights.

Jesse smiled at Brian and Brian smiled back. “Rough night, I hear,” Jesse said, twirling a pen around his long fingers and immediately dropping it.

“You could say that,” Brian said, “But you know, any day you get to sleep in is a good day.”

“Don’t I know it,” Jesse said agreeably, scooping up the pen and turning back to the blueprints. “Well, Vince has been bumping out the body for ya, and between you and me, I don’t think it’s as bad as it feels.”

Brian nodded in quiet gratitude, and quickly stopped when it made his head pound.

“Dom went over to Tran’s, but he’ll be back for dinner,” Jesse said, head bent and beanie sliding ever closer to the edge as he made some notes. “And he gave me _particular_ instructions to make sure that you did not touch that car without him here.”

Brian had startled, twitching away from Jesse for a second before he reined it back in. Jesus, but this job was doing something terrible to his self-control, and where was his training? Brian took a beat, forced himself to speak calmly.

“Dom went _where_?”

“Yeah,” came a growl behind him, and Vince walked up to the crew looking like Brian felt.

Jesse waved a placating hand, but Vince, of course, ignored it. “Dom was out this morning at Tran’s, ain’t been home since,” he said with a flat tone of voice. Brian couldn’t tell if Vince blamed him or not, but he’d bet it was more frustration, or worry. That made two of them.

“Those assholes have been barking around our heels for a while,” Jesse said, and even he sounded tense about it. “We mostly just thought it was a racing thing. They had a close clip at a race a few months back and Tran’s been steamed over it, claimed it wasn’t fair. Think he wants to humiliate Dom, prove his standing to the community.”

“Yeah, well, this seems like more than that,” Vince grunted, and Brian nodded his agreement.

“Well, fuck,” Brian said, because what else was there to say? Fuck Toretto and his fucking _responsibility_ , like it was his job to follow up with those assholes after the crash, and do what? Brian didn’t even know, and time was dilating around him, the minutes ticking down to the raid. Had Tanner even said when they would do it? It wasn’t for hours, yet. But Dom shouldn’t be anywhere near them. Brian had his hand in his back pocket, reaching for the phone, before he could even think about it.

“He took Letty,” Jesse said quietly, looking sideways at Brian like he said it for reassurance. “Couldn’t get someone better on your side if it comes to a fight, our Letty.”

“Idiots,” Vince said, spreading his arms out to encompass the whole world in that statement. Brian could only nod.  


*

“No,” Tanner explained, somewhat patiently, for the third time, “Raid’s going this evening, and we’ve had eyes on Tran all day. O’Connor, if your guy was there, he’s long gone by now.”

Brian rubbed his forehead. “But are you sure?” he asked, and he couldn’t make himself sound any less like a teenager at that moment.

“I am sure,” Tanner said. “Look, I don’t control where things go once evidence is brought in and arrests are made, you know that, if we’ve got confounding evidence that puts him there--puts any of them there--you know not one of us can control that, Brian, but we’ve got your report, we know where he was last night.”

Brian half-laughed, because that wasn’t exactly going to sound _great,_ his reports. From the outside, how would anyone understand that there was a fucking _difference_ between being a criminal gang running stolen goods for kicks like Tran’s, and a racing crew that, sure, played fast and loose with the law, but cared about whether people got hurt, was up against the world with nothing but willpower and gears.

“Ok,” was what he said, though.

“Ok,” Tanner said with hesitation in his voice. They both held the silence for a few moments longer than it was comfortable, until Tanner broke it. “You’ve got something I need to know, you’ll tell me, right?”

Brian looked backwards over his shoulder to the Toretto house where it sat off the road, so innocuous from the outside. “Yeah, yeah I would,” he said, and winced, but Tanner had what he needed, and soon the FBI would have they needed, and it would all be over, and Brian could go for longer than a day without feeling like he was fending off disaster, and maybe, at some point, _Brian_ could get what he needed, too.  


*

 

Brian had had every intention of staying on the couch for the foreseeable future, but he couldn’t stay put, thoughts buzzing around Satoshi, Tran, the raid. His fingers itched until they touched the sad, dinged up metal of the Supra, and then there was the comforting familiarity of work. Dom was right about that, anyway, that the work was the thing that would get you through any kind of day.

Brian lost track of time. He lost hours in the engine, diagnosing the damage to the axle and barking out parts for Jesse, who sat patiently on a stool with a notepad and his endless pens. Leon and Vince worked too, quiet and steady in the far corner of the garage, and every once in awhile Brian caught Vince’s eye and they exchanged--not exactly a nod, something like a grimace. With some grim satisfaction, Brian thought that now, at least, Vince would be on his side too. Nothing like shared anger and worry to bring people together.

Brian’s hands were shaking by the time a recognizable engine interrupted their work, and he wheeled in the garage to see Dom rolling up the driveway in what he privately thought of as the secondary Dodge, Letty in the passenger seat. Brian turned around and deliberately screwed pieces back in where he’d been working, wiped his fingers fastidiously on the clean rag.

Dom jumped out of the car. “What are you doing out here?” Dom asked, and he had the nerve to sound pissed. Letty took one look at Brian’s face and beat a retreat to the house. Smart woman.

Brian frowned down at the rag in his hands. “I’m doing something productive,” he said through his teeth, “Instead of looking for trouble.”

Dom plucked the rag right out of his hands, and jerked his chin in Letty’s retreating direction. “Let’s get inside,” he said.

“Inside! Jesus Christ!” Brian swore, and he bounced from one foot to the other with nervous, relieved, exhausted energy. “Why would you fucking _do_ something like that?”

“Bri,” Dom interrupted with warmth, and Brian shook his head.

“Don’t you _Bri_ me, you son of a bitch,” Brian said, unable to care that his voice was pitched a little too high and his hand gestures were getting a little too big. The drama came out when it felt like it was needed, what could he say. “What, like you’re gonna take on a whole gang by yourself? Did you chase down that poor semi driver too? Sue the train company? Anything else I should know about your activities this morning?”

Dom rubbed his chin with his hand. “Did you get food?” He asked. Brian snorted. “Did I get food. Did you beat Satoshi up? Is Tran gonna come murder me now? Why did you go over there?”

Dom raised the hand with the rag in it in a vaguely soothing gesture. “We just talked,” he said.

“Why,” Brian asked the Dodge, “Do I not feel reassured.” Dom laughed, and Brian glared at him.

“I mean it, Bri,” Dom said, and still that warm tone in his voice that was going to drive Brian completely nuts, it really was. “Things got way too heated too fast last night, and I don’t let that kind of thing happen in our scene.”

“Have you ever considered the idea, now just bear with me,” Brian said, “The idea that you’re not completely invincible? The idea that maybe, just _maybe,_ after you’ve been in a _car crash,_ you could consider taking it easy the next day, instead of showing up on the doorstep of the guy who waved a gun in your face before said car crash?”

Dom didn’t even have the grace to look a little sorry. Instead, he threw the rag onto a side table and took Brian’s shoulders, gently turning him towards the house.

“The truth is, I’m sick and tired of Tran getting in our space and it’s been coming for a while,” Dom said, “Playing reckless with my family. That shit ends _now._ He knows better, and you don’t need to worry about it. Now come on, let’s get a late lunch.”

Brian let Dom shepherd him towards the house and into the kitchen with no intention of closing this particular conversation, because obviously Dom was going to burst if he wasn’t being obnoxiously parental towards _somebody_ . He _was_ startled to find that the day had turned to evening and the sky was nearly black. 

But when they got to the kitchen, the words died in his throat. In the corner of the kitchen was a new arrival: a dark wood rocker chair that had to be handmade. It was beautifully and meticulously done, had a wine-dark cherry stain finish and curved legs, and it fit neatly into the small kitchen nook that had hitherto held a random stool or whatever pile of crap Vince had left in the hallway that day. It was tall and looked out into the kitchen from the corner so that whoever sat there could have a wide, perfect view of everything going on.  The chair was topped with a cushy pillow in the same obnoxious orange as the Supra. Brian noted, with some delight, that it was right next to the portable speaker he’d given Mia weeks ago, which clearly meant that he was destined to be the official Kitchen DJ from now unto eternity.

“Thought it was time you had a real place to perch, stop getting in Mia’s way,” Dom said, all casual.

Brian shook his head, rendered silent, all anger vanished, and who else could do that to him?

“You think this will work?” Dom said, his arms crossed over his chest and leaned sideways against the kitchen island.

Brian met his gaze, eyes bright, felt that magnet pull like the other night in the car, found himself leaning into it and towards the other man. The air felt electric and calm all at once, and Brian couldn’t blame a concussion or adrenaline or Satoshi waving a gun in his face anything other than his desires this time, but he wasn’t sure he cared.  

Brian’s phone buzzed in his pocket with the raid alarm, two long vibrations that Brian felt all the way to his feet. “Fuck,” he said before he could stop himself, because he was about to blow it, the op, the Torettos, and his own shitty heart, just wide open. Brian let out a half-assed laugh and leaned back, fake as shit but still convincing because, hey, he was good at his job. He felt Dom behind him, still smiling, but the charged air had gone out of the kitchen like a popped balloon.

“Fuck, I forgot, I have somewhere to be,” Brian said, thumbing his phone out of his pocket, backing towards the kitchen door, and what was he, fourteen and falling over his feet in front of his three hundred-student high school’s only gay boy, Mark Feynman again? Jesus Christ, this was the _job_.  “I gotta wait on a delivery for Frank. Probably pissed that I didn’t show up today again, probably gonna fire me and then Mia will have to appoint me her sous chef forever, and nobody wants that.”

“Ok,” Dom said, “But eat something tonight. And if Frank fires you, you let me know.”

“Please,” Brian said, unable to help himself, “I genuinely feel that you have done enough talking with people for today.”

He jogged down the steps with Dom’s laugh ringing in his ears.  

 

*

The job said that Brian had to wait in the studio apartment during the raid, safe as he could be undercover, ready to roll out if something happened. Nothing ever did happen during these nights, so Brian picked up a giant order of green curry and mango rice and spent the evening on the couch with a sci-fi novel. Despite the awkwardness of his abrupt exit from the Toretto’s, he went through the rest of his night in a happy daze. That timer that had started in his brain all the way back in Seattle was ticking itself out, finally. 

It was 3 o’clock in the morning when Tanner called, startling Brian awake.

“We’re sending someone to get you, _now,_ Brian,” Tanner said over the phone. Brian faltered, the hello dying on his lips. Tanner sounded tight, urgent. Something had happened.

“What is it?” He said tersely. God, were they ok? Had Tran made good on his threats and hit the house? Did he know that Brian was behind the raid? Had the raid gone bad? “What did Tran do?”

Tanner was silent for a beat, and Brian almost screamed. But-- “We’ve got Tran in custody. He didn’t do anything. He’s not our guy, Brian. Those goods weren’t the ones from the trucks.”

“That’s impossible,” Brian said. “It must be fake serial numbers, I saw them--”

“He’s not our guy, Brian,” Tanner interrupted. “No,” Brian said, but Tanner spoke over him.  

“There was another hit,” Tanner said, “ _Tonight,_ while Tran was in custody. Drivers in those damn black cars, ten miles south of you. But it was different this time, Brian,” Tanner stopped again, and Brian felt the kitchen tilt inwards around him, like the whole thing was going to implode under its own gravity.

“People got hurt this time,” Tanner said, clearly, irrevocably. “People died.”  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you SO much to everyone who has been reading and especially for your comments! Truth be told this is the very first fanfic I've ever written, and it's been so lovely and unexpected to get your kind encouragement. I appreciate your patience as I learn some of the conventions -- I added a few new tags based on where things went in this chapter. I hope the wreck wasn't too startling; of course, concussions are actually a big deal outside of the F&F universe and so is blacking out, so go to the hospital and don't be like these ridiculous fictional people. 
> 
> Thanks for your patience on this update, too! It's been crazy hectic at work lately. This is clearly going to be more than 5 chapters but I'm aiming to wrap it up in one or two more!


	6. Getting Burnt

Brian wasn’t good at a lot of things. Sitting through long movies, doing his taxes on time, living in one place for enough time that people’s Christmas cards made it without forwarding. In the baroque architecture that was the FBI, which undercover field agents avoided for as long as possible until they were dragged through hell and high water and cheap Monday night flights back to Virginia, he wasn’t particularly good at the networking or the _stakeholder management_ or whatever else you were supposed to do to make the desk jockeys care enough to bring you with them in their annual competitions up the totem pole. But Brian was good at detaching.

It came easily, that was the surprise. Brian had been scared shitless on his first undercover op, despite the training and the practice and the endless briefings. He’d been convinced that they would see it in his eyes, hear it in his voice, and the op would be over before it had started and it would be his head against the concrete. But they didn’t, and it wasn’t. Somebody at the FBI had guessed right: Brian was a _natural_ at undercover work. He could walk into a garage, into a gang, into an intricate collection of turf wars, and he’d find a role to play and the person they needed him to be.  And the longer the op went on, the worse it got, the better he was at being undercover, pulling on the strings of trust until it was done.  Somewhere, somehow, barreling straight through the adrenaline and the fear, Brian found a core of detachment, the eye of the tornado. He could float there forever.

So Brian was _good_ at this, good at the hard part when you needed to play it close and tight, hold everything that you’ve learned away in one corner of your mind and keep going, keep drawing the noose while you waited for the FBI to spring the trap. He’d always been able to detach, no matter what, no matter who he’d found out people really were.  It was _this, being alone,_ plus the driving--the sum total of what Brian was really, truly good at.

So why the fuck couldn’t he do it now?

*

There weren’t a lot of loose ends, Tanner had noted, and Brian heard the war between relief and sadness in his voice. They weren’t monsters _,_ you know, death was always a bad thing. But after a few decades in the FBI, Tanner understood the difference between a messy death and a clean one, and he wouldn’t have been human if he hadn’t taken it as a positive. Gotta stay focused on the job, Brian knew that.

“Andrew Staunta, fifty-five,” Tanner said, ticking facts that they both already knew off his fingers.

“He had an uncle somewhere, in his eighties, getting a minimal payout on the life insurance. The guy knows it was a car crash, pretty much. We sent someone to tell him that there’s an investigation, but you know, the guy is in a nursing home. Nobody’s gonna really follow up on it.”

Brian nodded, because it was true, because Andrew Staunta wasn’t _somebody_ in the sense that he wasn’t connected to money, to a big career, to the news or the gangs or anything else that it was their job to care about. Just a guy in the wrong truck at the wrong time, really.

Tanner rubbed his face with his hand, making no attempt to hide how tired he felt and how shitty this was. He’d already summarized the file three times, and Brian had started tracing out patterns on the opposite wall with his eyes. Tanner got overly careful when shitty things happened.

“This is the first hit we’ve tracked to them,” Tanner said, “But it was surely an accident. Frankly, the job seems like it was a mess.”

“What clued you off?” Brian asked, caustically. Tanner raised a shoulder in a conciliatory gesture, like, _I know._

“Nobody’s died before, hell, no other driver has even been injured. The other hits, they were more precise. This was a mess, so maybe something’s got them scared. They made off with only about half the gear in the truck. It’s clumsy, you know? They’ve never had a hit like this before.”

Brian could see the pictures clearly in his mind after poring over them this morning, so he merely nodded and didn’t look at Tanner pulled them out again, shuffled through, tapped his fingers against the impersonal crime scene shots. Nobody was infallible on the road, no amount of skill would overcome recklessness, sometimes. But he’d seen the tangle of tire burns and the way the truck had angled on the sloping road. It was a stupid play from the beginning, the wrong place to try to take the truck, and no easy way to ground it. Somebody had shouldered the truck too fast and it flipped, man against metal, no contest. Any good driver should have known better.

“Pushrod off the side of the road,” Tanner said quietly, “And it tracked to Frank’s. It was them, Brian.”

“I know,” Brian answered softly, “I know.”

*

Tran was getting released today, Brian knew, dint of an early  morning briefing early behind a donut place, with Bilkins trying to not look like a cop and failing.  

“Think about not getting murdered,” Bilkins had said, and Brian hadn’t even had the energy to do more than make a face at him, because, _fair._ The electronics had already been released back to Tran’s family, products of some big shipping deal that they’d produced receipts for and everything. The family was pissed. Tran was probably more than pissed. It might ultimately have been unsavory in some regard, some black market crossthrough somewhere down the line, but it wasn’t _their fucking case_.

Brian leaned into the Supra’s engine and wrenched at it. His fingers ached all the way down to the bone. The job, now, was to stalk Dom and the crew until they showed their hand, and call the FBI in for the raid when they did. No room for another mistake; Brian was lucky they didn’t can the whole op on him, making a bad call on Tran like that. He snapped a loose connection out, dropped it on the floor, and made a mental note to replace it with a new one from Frank’s backroom. It probably wasn’t necessary, but winning felt more important than it ever had for some reason that Brian was not going to examine.  

Whatever Dom was planning next, Tanner had made clear, it was probably happening during the race; he’d told Brian that the analysts had decided that was the most likely way that Dom’s crew traded their black market goods. Brian had had the thought that the race itself was enough for Dom’s crew, that the analysts didn’t _understand_ that, but it was a stupid thought. Brian frowned down into the engine.

“You all right?” Letty asked. Brian realized with a start that she was sitting on a stool by the Supra, just watching. It was unlike Letty to be so obviously watching, like a silent offer of something. Brian frowned at her for a millisecond and then smoothed it over, shuttering his eyes back to the car, where things worked according to predictable rules and didn’t try to hurt you. Not on purpose, anyway.

“Yeah,” Brian said with something like a half laugh, “Yeah, I’m good, yeah.”

Letty leaned off the stool and handed him a mallet and a rag. Brian threw the mallet on the part that needed it for a minute before giving up, and then he scrubbed his face with the rag and realized at the same time that he was drenched with sweat and maybe, a little bit, shaking.

“You sure?” Letty asked. Brian turned his face back into the car, put half his back in between himself and Letty like it was gonna help, maybe. She had to have been there, she was Dom’s righthand. Did she ride point, had she been the one to steer the truck to the downhill until Andrew lost control of his speed and his nerves?  

“I’m sure,” Brian said curtly. He felt Letty’s skepticism from here, but he didn’t have the reserves left to worry about it. “Just a little peaked.”

“I hear you,” Letty said, shifting her weight back on the stool and kicking one heel lightly against the rungs. “This shit with Tran’s got us all on edge, word was that he got scooped, nobody knows why. Wouldn’t have thought he’d have the nerve to cross into drugs, really.”

“Huh,” Brian said.

“Not the kind of thing Dom likes in the scene,” Letty observed, and Brian rolled his eyes where only the pistons could see. If Letty thought she was covering up for something, she was overdoing it.  

“Dom’s been holding this scene together for a long time,” Letty said, “Since he got back. It’s like it’s his penance, or something. But it changes despite him. These kids like Tran, they don’t play by the rules anymore. They get in trouble and they don’t seem to get what’s crossing the line. Just racing is never enough for them in the end.”

“Yeah,” Brian said.

Letty sighed, showed her weariness and her worry and her fatigue, like they were _friends._

“I tell him that we should get out of this scene, you know? Go somewhere new for a while, somewhere we won’t be chasing the same old races over again. And he’s never listened before.”

Brian can’t help himself, he glances at her again, and Letty has a lift in her eyes, something warm that jolts that sick feeling right back into his stomach _._ She smiled at him.

“He’s been listening a little, these days. Who’d have figured. After you race this thing next month, well, that’s a heap of money. We’ll see, right? Maybe Dom thinks there’s more to life now than just us, and the cars.”

Brian could see it, for a second, his own stupid vision reflected back at him, _maybe after all of this, you and me and everybody and a place somewhere on a beach, with a road that curls along the coast. Nothing to race but the waves and each other, for a while._

Brian thrust his hands back into the engine somewhat blindly, and a jagged edge caught on his hand. He pushed, hard, sent spikes of pain through the sore fingers, but it brought him back to reality. “We’ll see,” he said agreeably. Letty cocked her head to the side, but she didn’t probe, and Brian loved that about her even when he wished he didn’t.

“Take it easy, Bri,” she said, with enough of a knowing lilt to let him know that she was onto him, but she turned away because she was Letty.

Alone in the garage at last, Brian huffed a long sigh into the Supra’s open guts. He was sleep-deprived and nauseated and stupid, but it was more than that. When he closed his eyes it felt like a physical weight now, the op, the weight of this mission, find the evidence and keep his own stupid brain from spinning out before he could close this. He just had to find the eye of the tornado, float on through it, and get the fuck away from Letty, from Mia, from family dinners and dumb nights in a big living room, and from Dominic Toretto. Forever.

*  

By the end of the day Tran still hadn’t shown up at the garage, guns blazing, and Brian gradually felt the tension between his shoulders ease after a few comforting hours living in metal and oil.

It was short-lived. He heard Dom before he saw him, that calm heavy step up the stone walkway that led to the garage’s sidedoor. It would be a grey tank top day, and Brian hated that he knew that.

“Bri,” Dom said with surprise. Brian was supposed to be working at Frank’s that day, and Dom, well, Dom had made it pretty clear that Brian wasn’t far enough from his concussion to be wrenching over the Supra for five or six hours. Brian huffed a quick breath in through his nose.

“Hey Dom,” he said, all casual, Brian was the best casual that had ever casualed. Dom skirted around the jacked Mazda that Jesse had made Leon start disassembling earlier.

“So all that work on your kitchen chair for nothing?” Dom asked, “Thought I could get you to at least take a couple days’ break from the work.”

Brian raised one shoulder. Casual. “Head in the game, Toretto,” he said, rolling a wrench unnecessarily, “Or don’t you care about this race?”

Dom shrugged. “Less and less, Spilner,” he said with a thoughtful tone, “Less and less.”

Brian shook his head, “Unbelievable, that’s exactly why I’ve gotta be out here. Who else is gonna get our Supra back up to speed after you crushed her racing a god-damn _train?”_

Dom threw his head back and laughed, nothing but proud. Then he stepped forward and easily took the wrench from Brian, pushed the other man away from the car and onto the stool in a smooth gesture.

“In that case, I’ll take over from here,” he said, and Brian didn’t miss the way that Dom’s eyes swept over his face, his still slightly-shaky hands. Brian would bet that Dom had already asked Mia to send in some food.  Brian sighed.

“Don’t hurt her,” he said plaintively. Dom grunted, insulted, as he leaned back over the car.

“I would never,” he said.

*

Brian was terrible at this job. Brian was going to get himself killed. He’d snapped unnecessarily at Jesse at least six times, blanked in response to Letty’s quiet jokes, and was avoiding Mia entirely. All through the day he felt the tension drawing closer between himself and Dom, the other man working behind his back and focusing closer and closer, trying to figure it out. Everything Brian knew about Dom told him that he wasn’t going to give it up, that he was too observant to not know something had changed for Brian, something big. Brian knew, he _knew,_ he needed to maintain the easy camaraderie and...whatever it was that he and Dom had started building, out there on the road, just the two of them and an engine.  But Brian was running on no sleep, and every time he blinked, Andrew Staunta’s face pressed itself deeper into the back of his eyelids, and he just couldn’t do it.

The Supra, unlike Brian, had never looked better. Underneath the chaos and the fact that somebody had died and the line in Brian’s head that kept saying _you have to stop this, you have to catch them, you have to figure this out --_ there was still that burn under his fingernails when he touched the car, couldn’t believe that she’d really been materialized out of his memories and sweat and Dom’s big heart and Jesse’s frantic sketches. The crash had been vanished from her frame like magic. The kid had taken inspiration from the crash itself, even: where they’d beaten on a dent on the passenger side, Jesse had found a way to take an extra twenty pounds of metal off and streamline the sides even further with an artful, ingenious re-arrangement of the NOS pipes.

“For some of us, the curves just reveal themselves,” Jesse said airily in the living room one night, waving his hands ridiculously in figure eights and waggling his eyebrows at Brian until Vince, of all people, scooped him up and dropped him on his ass -- but on the couch.

Still, Brian was failing to act normal. So he wasn’t surprised, somehow, that Dom cornered him in the garage while Brian was wiping his hands on a rag, a heartbeat too slow to follow Leon and Letty out the side door, so exhausted he was dragging. He turned around and there was Dom, too close and too solid, and blocking the door, probably on purpose.

Instead of saying anything, Dom grabbed another rag off the table and brought it up so fast that Brian flinched. Dom just rolled his eyes and wiped a trail of oil off Brian’s arm that he hadn’t even noticed.

“We’re probably about done with her,” Dom said. Brian wasn’t sure exactly when the Supra had become less a handy way to spend a lot of time infiltrating the Toretto crew and more an extension of his own soul, but at least it seemed like it happened to Dom, too.

“Don’t be overconfident,” Brian said, stiffly despite his best efforts. Dom looked at his face steadily and didn’t step back out of his space, and Brian tried not to move away. He channeled the feeling into a doubtful shoulder lift instead, and looked away. “I haven’t even seen the track.”

“What is it, Brian? Is it the shit with Tran? What’s wrong?” Dom asked, his voice about as tight as Brian felt. Brian blinked at him, because Tran wasn't all that scary, but then again Brian Spilner probably couldn’t be expected to look at Tran and see all the empty posturing, the guns that never got fired.

“Nothing’s _wrong_ ,” Brian snapped, and Dom’s face turned dark.

“So let’s take it outside,” Dom said, and Brian flushed at the edge in Dom’s voice and his closeness and then he flushed at his own fucking shittiness, underneath the stress and the job and the crimes and everything that was so much more important, the fact that there was _all that_ and he was _still_ feeling like a teenager underneath it all, even though Dom was all but a murderer, was the bad guy Brian had been chasing his whole fucking life, and Brian just didn’t have room to feel all these things at once.

Dom turned on his heel, threw the garage door open and nodded towards the Supra, not bothering to look anything but pissed. “Drive.”

Brian thought for a minute that a drive would be good. The Supra needed a good spin before the drive east, anyway, so this could be a pressure test. But out in the late evening sun, warm in the Supra's cab with the engine rattling through him, Brian felt his blood start to boil with the need to release _something_. He gripped the steering wheel, let it go, and gripped again.

Ten feet away Dom gunned the engine on the secondary Dodge for longer than he needed to and Brian couldn’t help it, the corners of his mouth tried to smile. Trust Dom to find it easier to express emotions via an engine than actual talking. Twice, three times, and it was go.

Dom took off down the road without a lot of finesse, clipping the curb and bouncing across the narrow street to effectively cut Brian off. The edges of Brian’s mouth curled, but he forced his focus to the road and nothing but the road. The Supra was already picking up less wind, hugging smooth and beautiful to each twitch on the steering wheel, and Brian whirled past one twenty before he realized it. He dialed it back to save the stamina, hit a few gears and clipped a traffic sign for good measure. That would be a paint job tomorrow, just to save face at the race.

Dom was barreling down the road and gunning it more than Brian had ever seen in the daytime, driving fierce and almost erratic. There were no more than two feet between their bumpers when an oncoming car came around the next corner and its panicked, reactive swerve forced Dom to cut his speed, twist away from the middle of the road. Brian bit his own lip without realizing it, tasted blood, tore the wheel to the left and squeezed past the other car on the wrong side of the road, narrowly avoiding collision. But he was ahead, suddenly, between one breathe and the next he’d conquered the lead and Dom was left to gasp behind the Supra, no room to pass for such a wide car.

They hit the mark miles away from any further traffic. Brian braked without even bothering to check if Dom had moved away from the rear, or slowed enough to avoid rear-ending him. Dom was too good for that. In fact, Dom was parked and out of the Dodge with stunning speed, up to the Supra by the time Brian had just unbuckled his seatbelt.

Dom wrenched the front door open and he grabbed Brian by the front of his shirt and pulled him out onto the cement, easy as anything. Brian slithered for a second, his feet kicking through gravel, before he bounced up and hit Dom in the face, hard, but not hard enough to do real damage. Dom reeled back a little bit--not _nearly_ as much as Brian thought he would--and he _grinned,_ the motherfucker.

“Finally,” he said, “Gonna get your problem out of your system, Bri?”

Brian glared, grabbed Dom right back.

“Touch me again,” he ground out between his teeth, and somehow, that come out sounding like the opposite of a warning. Brian shoved Dom back against the Supra, _hard._

“Fuck you,” Brian said, wildly, for lack of anything else to say. Dom whipped his own arms up and around Brian’s torso, trapping Brian in his own hold, arms up in an awkward prayer and hands twisted against Dom’s chest. They stood in stalemate for a long, slow beat, Brian heard his heart rushing in his ears, felt a slick slide of sweat run down his back, and he had just time enough to think about how idiotic they were being and how post-race adrenaline was a horrible drug before Dom muttered _fuck you_ back almost like he was saying it to himself, and then he was pulling Brian even closer and _kissing him_.

Brian couldn’t really move, Dom still trapping him, and it helped. He spared exactly half a millisecond to shock before giving up to the kiss because really, who was he fucking kidding? Dom’s mouth was hot and hard and confident and everything Brian had told himself he hadn’t imagined it would be--perfect. He pinned more than held Brian and that was also perfect, that the maelstrom in Brian’s head could reduce at least for this moment into something compressed by Dom’s arms, like _this_ was the calm in the eye of the tornado. Brian dug his fingers backwards in the hold, twisted them into Dom’s skin and felt the other man make a noise like appreciation that just about short-circuited Brian’s brain, that _he_ had done that. He kissed back, heedless of the pain in his sore lip.

And then they had to breathe. Brian felt Dom pull away just a millimeter and inhale, his arms gentle into something less like a vice grip and more like an embrace, and Dom’s eyes opened and his head started that familiar tilt to the side, half-smirk, ready to say something obnoxious and all-knowing.  

“Get the fuck away from me,” Brian snarled, pulling away so fast it might have seemed like flinching. Dom dropped his arms immediately.

Brian couldn’t even make eye contact with Dom as he threw himself into the Supra, head down and all but falling over himself to get there before Dom could say anything. Brian felt it all in an instant, an oil spill blooming in the middle of his chest, self-hate and shame and longing and attraction. But Dom didn’t make a move to come after him, didn’t say anything at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for continuing to read and for your kudos and comments, they make me so happy!!


	7. Getting Saved

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brian saw it spinning out in front of him, the trap he’d rigged without fully realizing the consequences, setting up an ambush when he knew it was the wrong call. And Brian knew, finally, what mattered.

The mesa where they held the race was east, a long drive that unspooled away from LA and away from the LAPD, far enough that the scene could camp for a while, bask in its own greatness. Like the first night he’d raced, Brian marveled at it: people came out to camp for the whole weekend, set up grills and tables and orderly camping gear. The scene was alight with community, laughter floating over the hoods of the beautiful machines.

Brian got there early on Wednesday, drank the minimal amount of black coffee required for brain functioning since he forgot to bring any creamer, and spent a long and beautiful day learning a side track along with just a handful of other early birds, some drivers from San Diego and LA and one big and confident group of kids that had carpooled in from Arizona. Brian watched them roll drags in oversouped Mazdas, wondered if anybody was teaching them finesse over speed, shook his own head at himself, because when did he start thinking about shit like that? Spend too much time in a crew and everybody starts looking like a family.

The actual track for the main event was closed and studded with tire shredders as a precaution, but racing the practice drag brought the shimmery, slippery, off-road textures into focus. Brian felt himself getting better and better through the day, body in sync with the Supra on a whole new level. The air smelled like everything Brian liked about southern California: dry and fragrant, subtle desert flowers, clean dirt. After a long day blessedly free of actual thought, he sat on the tiny porch steps of the trailer they’d reserved, watching the stars turn on. The crew had reserved the trailer a few months ago, although Brian noticed that it had enough bunks for all of them, including him. Just another Dominic Toretto detail, he supposed, everybody with a place of their own.

They hadn’t really spoken since the kiss. Brian absolutely thought this was for the best, and definitely did not think was torturous and awful and unsustainable and ultimately leading to premature grey hairs. In his braver moments, Brian had to admit that Dom’s behavior was entirely understandable, unlike, perhaps, his own. _Brian_ had stayed as far away from the garage as he could without entirely pissing off Tanner and Bilkins, catching up on sleep and actually putting in a few hours at Frank’s. He’d seen Dom, of course, at the garage tooling on the Supra for those final touches, but they kept a wide berth, heads down, focused on the work. Dom didn’t seem angry like Brian had feared, and he couldn’t decide if that were better or worse, if he would’ve preferred the man to get in his face, yell a little bit, make _something_ happen, demand an explanation. Instead, Dom was careful, gentle, polite, like a smooth piece of glass that Brian couldn’t get any purchase on, his words just sliding off.

If the crew knew something was fucked, they didn’t say anything. Brian felt too exhausted to even speculate on what they guessed, but he was grateful nobody seemed inclined to ask. He’d caught a few lingering glances from Letty, a stumble or two from Jesse, but from Mia, the person he’d actually expect to know the most, nothing had changed, same warmth radiating out to him when he stole into the kitchen a few times between the long hours of engine work, checking, carefully, that Dom was still in the garage. Brian felt pathetically grateful for Mia, clinging onto the final moments of balance and calm that she, sister of Dom Toretto and probable second leader of the world’s most ragtag driver crew, had clearly spent a lifetime developing.

In true form, Mia surprised Brian by coming on Thursday after closing the market for a long weekend and brought coffee creamer, and one of Brian’s scifi novels with her. Brian’s heart clenched when he saw it.  Mia liked being there early, she confided, and Brian caught a glimpse of the person that he’d felt such instant understanding with back on that first day in the market, someone who could easily hold her ground in the thick of it all but wanted to step back, watch everybody else. Something they shared.

“Smart of you to come early too,” Mia observed, like Brian had had an actual strategy about it. “What with Tran and all, there’s a greater than zero chance some asshole might be out here trying to sabotage the track. I felt better knowing you were here.”

Brian had not actually worried about _that_ specific possible disaster, so he added it to the internal list, and sighed.

“Is Tran causing trouble?” Brian asked, because Dom hadn’t said anything, although he supposed that he’d made it a little bit less likely that Dom would involve him. Still, Brian couldn’t help the annoyed twinge that flashed through him, because Tran was something that he and Dom had experienced together, so Dom could’ve said something. Should've said something. Maybe.

Mia was looking at Brian with a face that was too knowing. “He’s not causing trouble,” she said, “And that’s got us a little worried. Not usually a guy to show self-restraint, right? Dom and Vince have been keeping an eye on him, but he’s been sulking at home. He’ll be here tomorrow. It’s always something with these drivers, so _emotional_.”

Brian threw a balled-up napkin at her. “Is that your race job, then,” he teased, “eyes and ears? Gonna upgrade that to driving one of these weekends?”

Mia laughed. “I don’t race, at least, not at shit like this.” Brian nodded, but he filed away the fact that Mia _did_ race, he’d give a lot to see Mia drive, lining up curves and acceleration like complicated sets of ingredients; then he un-filed it, remembering that there was no future of his that had Mia in it anymore, gripping the wheel of a blue Acura with a grin on her face.

“This is Dom’s baby,” Mia laughed, “He’s calling it _Race Wars,_ says it’s gonna be a whole thing. Eventually, it might even be legal, and wouldn’t that be something? Dom has some big ideas about racing and the way it brings people together, the things you could do with these cars when you’ve got people like Jesse in your garage.”

“Who knows. But for now, you and me, we can keep an eye on the track at least,” Mia said. “Never hurts anybody to be careful around these things. Dom likes to run a safe scene. Last year, the first time we did this, some hotshot thought he’d shoot _fireworks_ out from behind the flags at the starting line to scare everybody, and you shoulda seen Dom’s face. I think that guy’s still banned from every scene south of Alaska.”

 _Safe._ Brian scowled sadly into the coffee beans he was grinding.

“I would’ve thought you’d want to roll in with the crew,” Brian said, making himself busy steeping a reparatory pour-over that was going to go a long way against his headache. “All epic drifts, thumping bass, whole fam together, conquering army shit.” He quirked an eyebrow at Mia.

Mia laughed. “I’m with you, aren’t I?” she said.

*

Friday dawned with the best conditions anyone could have asked for, clear skies and low haze, and Dom Toretto rolling in early in the morning and startling Brian awake like he could recognize the goddamn way the man _opened a car door._ Brian turned over in his bunk, pulled the thin camping pillow over his face, and sent a prayer up to Beyonce, Michael, and anyone else who might be listening. He felt it ripple through him, the conviction that this would be it, the very last leg in this very long race.

Brian waited for fifteen minutes before giving up on sleep and rolling out of bed to go find the Supra in the pre-sunrise blue light. And if he waited until Dom had thrown his bags on the furthest bunk and left the tiny trailer, well, that was his business. Brian was congratulating himself on successfully getting outside unnoticed when he walked around the corner of the neighboring trailer and straight into Tran.

“Hey,” the man grunted, shoving Brian slightly, but he looked more predatory than angry, an unpleasant smirk on his face that had Brian’s hackles rising immediately.

“What a pleasure,” Brian said, “Haven’t seen you since I watched the rear-end of your chop bike run away from a train.”

Tran’s lip curled. “Don’t start a race if you can’t take responsibility for it,” he sneered, turning away.

“Yeah,” Brian shot back, unwisely, “Don’t lift electronics if you can’t take responsibility for it.”

Tran wheeled back around, eyebrows raised and sneer deepened, and Brian cursed himself. Was he looking to self-destruct? Wouldn't be the first time, now that he thought about it.

“I’ve been looking forward to this,” Tran said, stepping forward, rolling his fingers into the palm of one hand while Brian considered the potential downsides of a pre-race fist fight.

Brian lifted his hands, palms up, half-laughing to distract Tran from the way he shuffled his feet to ground downwards, started rotating into defense. Tran swung an arm back and Brian was just about to block it when Tran’s arm stopped in mid-air.

Jesse hung off the back of Tran’s arm, his feet scraping in the dust. “Stop,” he said, obviously trying to sound tough, and just sounding scared.

“How many of you even _are_ there?!” Tran said, and Brian almost laughed, because for real, you just could not underestimate the Toretto collection of strays.

“Enough,” said Jesse firmly, still in Tran’s face, and Brian gave him points for courage. Brian put out an arm to intervene.

“Let’s save it for the track, wouldn’t want to miss the race just because we annoyed Dom into kicking us out, right?” Brian said, injecting everything he knew about deflating tension into a soothing tone of voice. And miraculously, inspired by the power of a cash prize, Tran shook Jesse off with a sneer.

“Like it’s worth my time anyway,” Tran said, and he was turning away, but Jesse’s face had crunched into something that Brian recognized years ago, all _not good enough_ and rage, and he wasn’t fast enough to stop it.

“So let’s find out on the track,” Jesse spat, and Tran stopped.

“You really wanna challenge me?” Tran asked, sharp-eyed and dark.

“No,” Brian breathed, but they both ignored him, a train coming out of the dark that nobody was gonna stop now, and Jesse nodded.

“Then let’s make it interesting,” Tran said. “You race today with us, and we wager a pink slip.”  

This was the worst de-escalation ever. Brian threw his hands up, but again, he was being ignored. Jesse folded his arms over his chest defensively, still glaring at Tran.

“You want my Jetta?” Jesse asked, unable to keep the disbelief from his voice. Tran laughed, short and nasty.

“I don’t,” he said. “So we’ll race for the car that you can build me. You place higher in the race than I do, you get my S2000. I place higher than you, I get you for a year in my garage, designing _my_ cars. You leave the Torettos and come work for _us_.”

Jesse snorted, but he was already bouncing forward, and Brian groaned out loud as they shook hands.

“Dom is gonna kill you,” Brian said when Tran left, worried. _Dom will take care of it,_ he told himself, after the race, after everything goes down, after Brian finishes his job. Then again, Dom probably couldn’t take care of it from prison.

“Oh, please,” Jesse said, eyes too bright. “It’s gonna be great, Bri, it’s finally my moment!”

Brian watched the kid turn away, all recklessness and longing, and he put his head in his hands. _Keep it the fuck together._ This wasn’t his crew to worry about.  By the time this weekend was over, he’d be long gone.

*

Time moved too slowly until it didn’t--Brian felt like he blinked and the formerly peaceful camp was a frenzy of revving engines and gathering bodies, and there they were lined up to start. Letty moved the Supra into position for Brian per Dom’s careful rule that drivers couldn’t jockey each other for inches at track entrance, and she squeezed Brian’s arm as she handed him the keys. Brian shook his hands out as he eyed the gathering crowd, danced from one foot to the other. The Supra was perfect. The day was perfect, and everything was perfect except for Brian’s head.

“You feeling ok?” Dom asked, low and careful. Brian blanked, unable to respond to the most personal thing Dom had said in a while, and he just stared back at Dom like an idiot. Dom looked nervous, but determined. “I know how you get,” he said, “Antsiest driver I’ve ever met.”

Brian rolled his eyes but gave up a half-smile. “Oh, I’ll be fine,” he said, “We did good with her.”

Dom rolled a hand across the top of the Supra’s door frame, the other side of which had met Brian’s head a few weeks before, but there was no sign of that now. He flat-out patted the car fondly, and Brian could not look away fast enough. “We really did,” Dom said, “Don’t let her down.”

Brian buckled in, took some calming breaths, felt himself settle into the seat and forced his hands to unclench. Dom tapped on the halfway down window.

“Hey Bri,” he said, already heading out to get away from the starting line, “Antsiest driver I’ve ever seen, but the best one, too.” Brian smiled at the wheel.

Brian was moving before he even realized he’d heard the starting gun. For an instant there was a narrowing, the focus of his senses pulling in tightly to the race and making it almost seem like the world was tilting, the cars falling rather than leaping forward, metal glinting in the sun. Brian hit floor the instant the road was clear, because in a race this big, the first five cars out were going to be the first five cars at the end. He landed in exactly fifth position, an easy clip behind Tran and a modded Charger with an ugly trim. They jockeyed around the first curve, the second, and Brian caught Jesse’s Jetta in his rearview window and winced. The kid was meters behind Tran, and would never catch up, but Brian couldn’t worry about that now.

Brian pulled a tight turn out of the crowd as the Charger started drifting left, slowly and almost imperceptibly, but Brian felt it in the way his teeth rattled. Sure enough, something in the Charger started firing, its engine burnt already. Seven seconds in, at least four cars were down already from engine bursts or clipping each other off the track.  

The first curve was a whipper, and Brian stayed far to the outside. It cost him time and distance but it saved him from getting entangled in the predictable first-curve pileup, _Vegas driving,_ he thought with a sliver of gratitude. The Charger peeled out in a spectacular collision with an Integra, and Brian caught a glimpse of their faces as he danced around them, slipping between their spin-out like there was a bubble of protective air around the Supra. She was marvelous, she was a dream, she was all of Dom’s power and all of Brian’s lightness. They’d built the perfect car.

The race had now clearly split, Brian and Tran and two others in the leader group, the followers straggled off in a ragged crew of drivers desperately competing to make sure they weren’t the one who finished last. The world focused even further in on the second curve, the beginning of the real race: Brian held steady speed for a few seconds before pumping the gas, getting just a boost enough to pull forward and around to the inside curve. It saved him a good twenty feet and shot him on the inside past a Civic, past an RX, and neck and neck with Tran.

Tran drove entirely on engine, Brian could tell that immediately. Whatever he’d rigged under the hood was incredible, probably stronger than the Supra, probably cost more than everything Brian owned put together. It rode smooth and steady past one thirty without a flicker of burnout. Where he got the _money_ if not from pulling jobs, Brian couldn’t imagine. The Supra couldn’t compete with that kind of engine, not for long enough, but Brian had to hold it until the last minute when he could pull the NOS--Brian huffed air through his teeth and threw everything he had into handling. He jagged left on a slick piece of sand that threw a spin under Tran’s wheels, subtly steered Tran to the outside of the track and caught a few more feet each time they curved. Tran wrenched the wheel and tried to muscle his way back into an easy lead, but Brian’s steering was better.

They held the front line, thirty more feet, fifty more feet. Brian’s extra days of practice were counting for something now; he read the sand better than Tran, spun him out on the tricky hillocks that were all but invisible under the harsh sunlight and kept him from truly using the power of his engine, tangled him up in steering corrections. Brian caught Tran’s face, scowled and nasty in the window, and he winked. Tran yelled something completely useless from inside the car, and hit the NOS.

He shot ahead like a fucking rocket, flames streaking out a modified back pipe and burning a nasty scar onto the front righthand side of the Supra. Brian clicked his tongue, _so rude,_ but a wide smile spread itself across his face: _too soon._ He counted, and time dilated to a quiet pulse, the heartbeat in his ears, the thrum of tires: _one, two, three, four, five._

Brian hit the NOS. Brian didn’t believe in god or astrology or fate but as the Supra leapt, he flung every piece of his soul towards the finish line, light and air and American muscle merged with the Supra frame and shitty pop songs and stupid hope and the idea that maybe, _maybe,_ one good thing could happen today. Tran’s engine choked mere yards from the finish and Brian floated on past, through the line, through the open, panting crowd and to a stop. Brian _won._

The crowd screamed. Brian tumbled more than stepped out of the Supra, _seems like I’m always falling out of this car,_ but eager hands grabbed at him either to stabilize, or pull him down. It was a mess of yelling and screeching as more cars came into the finish and more people ran down the line. Brian smelled sweat and sunblock and he panicked for a second but then he saw Letty’s elbow flashing in the crowd, parting people left and right, and he was surrounded by the crew.

“BRIAN!” Leon, of all people, roared while Vince hoisted Brian up on his shoulders. Brian pumped two fists in the air and then brought one of them down to point at Mia, who was jumping and screaming with the best of them. Vince patted Brian’s knee and gingerly bounced up and down, and Brian threw back his head and laughed hysterically. _We won._ Feet away, Dom was handling things with the race commissioner, something that involved signing, and a case that was full of money and sunshine and long vacations on the coast. Not that Brian was looking at Dom, and not that Dom was looking at Brian, and not that they couldn’t stop themselves from exchanging huge, unreserved grins, not at all.  

In the chaos, no one noticed that Jesse wasn’t there.

*

Brian was juggling a Corona and his phone, DJing for the entire party after loudly insisting that it was his prerogative as winner despite the round of boos that had met his first pick, an ill-advised Drake single. But the party was hopping now, sweaty bodies and happy drivers and just the right amount of not-much-light. Brian frowned at the aux cable that had snaked around one arm and was dragging on his small arm hairs: technology was complicated. Life was complicated. Brian was a little pissed, a little drunk, and just a little out of control.

And of course, Dom was making everything worse. He was somehow both always at the edge of Brian’s vision and also constantly out of reach. He was wearing a stupid white tank and hardly drinking and occasionally talking to somebody who wasn’t Brian. Brian swigged his beer and tapped aggressively at the phone until a particularly banging remix of _Despacito_ came on. Everybody needed to channel a little Enrique, sometimes.

“Hold this,” Brian yelled into Leon’s ear, who nodded sleepily and took the phone. Leon had already expended all of the energy he carried at any one time in his long body, and was falling face-forward into one of couches somebody had dragged out under the desert sky. Mia and Letty were being chatted up by the Arizona youngsters, which Brian found hilarious if only for the expression on Letty’s face, and Vince was having more luck on his own with some girl that Brian recognized from the market. Crew distracted, nobody to tell him not to, Brian pushed his way through the crowd to where Dom stood, a little separate from it all.

“We won,” Brian announced when he got there. Dom nodded, but it wasn’t satisfying, it was like his chin got caught on the way down, and couldn't quite demonstrate the enthusiasm that Brian thought was warranted. So Brian got closer to Dom’s face and put a hand on his chest. “We _won,”_ he said, pushing for emphasis.

“We sure did,” Dom agreed, gently grabbing his arm and pulling it down, pushing Brian away. For some reason, this was infuriating. Brian glared.

Dom sighed. “What do you want, Brian?” he asked.

“We should celebrate,” Brian said, “After all, we’ve only got tonight.”

At that, Dom looked at him, sharp and perceptive. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

Brian shrugged, took another drink, looked nonchalantly back at the crowd of dancing drivers as if he hadn’t been the one to come over. But the problem with Dom was that he’d leave you alone exactly up until the point when you started something, and then he wouldn’t let you go until he’d finished it.

“Brian,” Dom said, getting in Brian’s space and almost succeeding in forcing him to look down. But if Brian leaned ridiculously far back and crossed his arms over his chest and generally acted ridiculous, he didn’t have to look Dom in the eyes, where he would get lost.  So he did.

“Brian,” Dom said again, and he put his big hands gently on Brian’s crossed arms, just resting there with his palms barely pulling Brian back in, even though _he_ had just been the one to push Brian away, make up your damn mind, Toretto: “You can talk to me.”

Brian swallowed, hard. “Why would you say that?” He asked, and he heard his own voice come out calmly, so the training counted for something, at least, even if it wasn’t saving him from making a complete fucking idiot of himself on a god-damn deep cover mission, when he didn’t even know _why. What the fuck is wrong with you, Brian?_

Dom was stepping forward. Unlike certain undercover FBI agents, Dom always knew what he wanted, and god help him, it seemed like that was Brian. So Brian backed away, because at least he could _try,_ until he hit the wall with Dom crowding him up against it. They were so close that Brian could almost taste Dom’s breath, could feel his body heat, always glowing like a furnace, no wonder the man seemed allergic to sleeves.

“Because there isn’t a winter in Arizona, or Barstow, or any of the other places you tell people you’re from,” Dom said, moving his hand to wrap Brian’s shoulder like he couldn’t stop touching him, gave him a shake that vibrated with controlled frustration and held-back power. Brian felt the touch shudder down his back and pool in the pit of his stomach _._

“Because you leave Frank’s whenever you feel like it and nobody knows where you go except that Frank does, and he won’t admit it. Because you talk like you’ve only been driving for a few years, but you’re better than any driver on my crew except for Letty on a good day. Because _I can see it in your eyes_.”

“I know you’re lying to me. I’ve always known you were lying to me. I don’t know what, but the real thing is, I don’t know why.”

“You don’t have to like me, Brian, and fuck, I’m sorry for what happened after we drove. But I thought you trusted me.”

Dom’s heavy hand was still on Brian and Dom probably wasn’t even aware of the way that his fingers were digging into the curve of Brian’s upper shoulder blade, like he could sink right through Brian’s skin, scoop out his heart, get the truth. It hurt, and for some reason, Brian liked it.

“We won, can’t you just be happy with that?” Brian said flatly, “You got what you needed, didn’t you?”

Dom’s face darkened. “Not even close,” he said, and Brian dropped his beer, heard it crunch in the sand, grabbed awkwardly at Dom’s jaw, and kissed him.

He pressed his mouth into Dom’s for a good instant before the other man moved at all, so Brian just kissed more insistently, worked with teeth and tongue and a little viciousness, and then _finally,_ Dom started kissing back. Dom leaned them into the wall until the back of Brian’s head should have hit it but instead hit Dom’s hand, which he’d braced on the wall. Brian felt himself smile just a little bit at that, but he was more focused on twisting his hand up underneath Dom’s shirt to the skin of his back, the way Dom’s other hand had come up to grab his hip, thumb riding over the bone. Brian sank back even further into the wall and he took Dom with him, slotting his right heel around the back of Dom’s leg and tugging them closer.

“Guys, I’m sorry,” Letty said, actually sounding sorry, “But you need to come NOW. It’s a fucking emergency. It’s Tran, Tran’s got Jesse.”

*

Vince was holding Satoshi in a vice grip behind their trailer, hidden from the party by their cars. The goon looked a little scared, but he spat on the ground defiantly as Dom strode up, shaking the earth with every step.

“Where’s Jesse?” Dom growled. Vince shook Satoshi like a rag doll for emphasis.

“I’ve got a message from Tran,” Satoshi said. “In payment for his inconveniences, he’d like you to hand over your stock, and he’s holding the kid for collateral in our warehouse ten miles out.”

Brian winced from where he stood behind Dom, fingers twitching in the air for the gun he wasn’t carrying. He felt paralyzed, useless; he felt the weight of his phone in his pocket, the one dial that would launch SWAT.   

“That’s _ridiculous_ ,” Letty said, “We had nothing to do with Tran’s arrest!”

“Save it for someone who believes you,” Satoshi sneered. “We know you’ve got more than enough stock from your last heist to pay. And if you want your little blueprint monkey back--”

“Enough,” Dom said, and the crew silenced immediately. They no longer looked like bickering racers--they hung, poised and deadly, like a well-oiled machine just waiting for the starting gun. If some tiny part of Brian’s brain had wondered whether they were _really_ behind the heists, that doubt was silenced forever.

“We have the stock,” Dom said, “We’ll bring it to Tran, no questions asked, nobody has to get hurt. We just want Jesse back.”

Satoshi rolled his eyes. “Thought you’d see it our way, Toretto. Even you couldn’t expect to get away with this. Your scene is on its way _out,_ can’t come soon enough.”

Dom stared him down, and even from where he stood to the side, Brian shivered with the controlled rage in Dom’s shoulders. But he was too smart to waste time on this. Dom was all focus, and Brian only noticed that Dom shot a quick look in his direction because he was watching so closely.

“Tie Satoshi in the trailer for now, Mia and Brian can watch him. Vince, Letty, Leon, you’re with me.”

“The hell you’re leaving me behind,” Brian said quickly.

Mia stepped up from where she’d been waiting, put a hand on Brian’s arm. “Let’s go,” she said. Brian shook his head.

“I’m coming,” he said.

“I agree,” Letty spoke up unexpectedly, “We’re outnumbered, Dom, we need everyone.”

Dom took one long beat, and then nodded, and the crew started moving to secure Satoshi in the trailer and load the cars, pulling earpieces and gear together with smooth fluidity. Brian watched it as if from a distance, the curtain drawn back at last.

“Bri,” Dom called, and Brian turned around. Dom was reaching towards him without a hint of self-consciousness. He slid his finger down Brian’s cheek in a swift, but intolerably intimate gesture. Brian felt it like a burn. “I’ll explain everything when we get back,” Dom said, apology in his eyes.

“You don’t have to,” Brian said, and Dom smiled at him.

*

There was only had one job now: finish the op, capture the drivers, and whatever wreckage that caused was irrelevant. And in the end, it was easy: everyone distracted by the crush of motion to secure Satoshi and load the cars, Brian stepped away from the trailer to place the call.

“This is special agent O’Connor,” Brian said, and he noticed, as if from a long distance, that his hands were shaking again. “We’ve gotta move on this now.”

He gave his confirmation code, the warehouse coordinates, and there was an acknowledgment from the line, an impersonal voice that was going to turn around to Tanner, who would make another phone call, that would ruin the Torettos’ lives. It would take them a while to scramble, but Brian could try to control the situation until they did. Brian tried to remember how to breathe, looked up from his phone, and saw Mia standing there. Around them, the crew was piling into their cars and gunning engines, everything moving at once. Over the noise, Brian had no idea how much Mia had heard, what she was thinking.

“Brian,” Mia said, and there were a thousand uninterpretable emotions in her voice, “Bri, it’s not what you think.”

Brian shook his head at her, unable to come up with anything. There was no _time._

“Just give Dom a chance to explain,” Mia said, like she could encapsulate everything in that.

Brian was in the Supra and off before he could even process what that meant, his hands shifting the gears on their own volition.  Whatever the cost, he was going to see this through to the end.

*

For someone who wasn’t a field agent, Dom set the op up well. They killed the lights once they were walking distance from the warehouse and left the cars there, far away enough that Dom could send Vince to circle round the back while he, Letty and Brian went in the front. Brian thought that producing his own gun from the trailer might have raised questions in a less pressing time, but now, it would hardly matter if it did.

Tran and his crew were making no attempt at stealth. The warehouse was well-lit and Tran was in the middle with a gun to Jesse’s temple. Jesse looked miserable and scared, but alive and ok. Brian sent up a thank-you-prayer to the pop gods.

“Finally,” Tran said, “For someone who’s supposed to be so fast, thought you might actually not keep us waiting.”

“Look,” Dom said, holding out a hand, palm open, key hanging from one finger, “We brought the key to our stock warehouse, Tran, it’s all yours, everything we've lifted. Nobody needs to get hurt. We didn’t attack you.”

He tossed the key to Tran, who pocketed it. Tran actually _hissed,_ which was impressive or maybe impressively stupid, because Dom looked like the scariest thing Brian had ever seen, all muscle and anger, towering towards Tran like a force of nature.

“Let Jesse go,” Dom said.

“You know what I always hated the most about you, Dom?” Tran spat. Dom tilted his head. “What's that, Johnny?” he asked. Brian could practically see the way Dom’s eyes were darting over Jesse, counting the guns trained on them, looking for exits. But worryingly, Tran wasn’t releasing his grip.

“Your god-damn _righteousness_. Like you’re the only one who’s allowed to run the scene, who’s allowed to pull jobs. And then instead of having it out to my face, you sneak around behind us, send the cops after me like a fucking coward.”

 _Just wait_ , Brian thought. SWAT would be here in twenty minutes, and Brian was counting every one. The noose was tightening around them all and Brian was the blunt instrument of their destruction, Dom, the crew, Tran and his men, they’d all go down together.

“I don’t send the cops after people, and I don’t send my crew out without _me_ ,” Dom said contemptuously, losing a little bit of the control in his voice. “We don’t fuck with innocent drivers, and take jobs we can’t pull. We don’t _hurt people,_ Johnny, and that’s what _you_ never understood.”

Brian frowned at that, because it didn’t make any sense, but Tran just laughed.

“See, you act so tough, but where does all that righteousness really get you?” He scorned, “Right here. You kept me out, Dom, you wouldn’t make room in the scene for our crew? Well now you lose it all. More than you even guessed.”

Brian felt a cold wave of realization roll over him, a slant to the world suddenly resolving into the answer to the puzzle in his brain: _it wasn’t them, Tran’s crew had pulled the Staunta job_ . But Brian’s personal heartbreak crashed in the back of his mind unattended, because Tran’s grip was tightening on Jesse in a way that Brian recognized from too many ops, too many tragedies, too many moments he’d rather not live through again. Brian felt it all pull into focus like a race: Tran wanted nothing more than to hurt Dom, and the best way to hurt Dominic Toretto was to hurt his family. And he saw it spinning out in front of him, the trap he’d rigged without fully realizing the consequences, setting up an ambush when he knew it was the wrong call. And Brian _knew,_ finally, what mattered.

“Now, Vince,” Brian said, calm and loud, and at the same instant he fired. The shot was perfect: it grazed Tran’s arm and the arm skewed, thrown behind Tran in an ugly whip. The bullet Tran had meant for Jesse went wild into the side of the warehouse, and all hell broke loose.

Vince was coming in from the other side, pinning down Tran’s righthand man and best shot. The distraction gave Brian the five seconds he needed: he kicked out with his right foot as he charged forward, knocked Letty two feet to the side and out of the firing path of another of Tran’s goons. He dropped the guy an instant later with a precision shot to his leg, barrelled into Tran and wrapped his arm around Tran’s torso like they were dancing, using his body as a shield. Vince and Dom were slower than Brian— _everyone_ was slower than Brian, obviously—but they’d still gotten in front of the others, weapons trained. Letty came up on Brian’s right side with a metal pipe she’d picked up from the warehouse floor, bless her.

Predictably, with Tran down, his gang was lost, and Brian saw the panic on their faces as they stumbled back. Easier to kill somebody on the road than five feet in front of you, Brian had learned that a long time ago. They were good, but not as good as Brian: no one ever was.

“You wanna know who called the cops,” Brian spat, gun pressed to Tran’s head, “ _I_ called the fucking cops. And they’re fifteen minutes away, so we’ll do them a favor and tie you up for them. Unless you'd rather get out of here in a bodybag.”  

The tension hung in the air, _one, two,_ the flickers of doubt in Tran’s men’s eyes turning into full-out panic; all you needed was to see the hole before the other drivers and get through it, and you could win. They dropped their weapons.

“Bullshit,” Tran said, “You’ll all get arrested too. I’ll tell them everything, tell them about your goddamn heists, Dom! You can't run away from this!”

“Funny,” Brian said, “Because as I recall, the heists were some souped-up black Civics, rather similar to the ones that pulled the Staunta job. And you’re the one who has the key to the storage space where all the stock is being held.”

*

“What,” Vince said with amazement in every syllable, “The _fuck,_ Brian _,”_

Brian ignored him and finished quickly tying down Tran after wrapping his arm in one of his sleeves; Brian had seen a lot worse, but Tran was still holding his arm and whimpering. Typical. “Are you ok?” Brian asked Jesse.

“I’m ok,” the kid said in a voice just above a whisper.

“We need to get him out of here,” Letty choked. Brian whirled: she was crouched over Leon, pressing her hands into his side. Tran’s bullet for Jesse had gone wild, but another one had made it through: Leon gazed in wonder at the spreading sea of red washing through his shirt.

“Just like a movie,” he murmured.

Brian closed his eyes, just for an instant. They’d been so close: two minutes to get to the cars and bail, cleanly away. He’d almost gotten away with it.

“Letty, keep up the pressure and stay with Leon,” Brian said, pulling his phone from his pocket. “Neither of you have records. You’re gonna be safe, I promise. They only want Dom.”

“How the fuck do you know--” Vince started, but Letty shot him a glare and he fell silent. Brian felt Dom’s eyes on him, felt the loaded weight of everything that had happened and every second that ate up the meters between the team and arrest. But as he dialed the last number, Brian also noticed that his hands were completely steady.

“This is special agent Brian O’Connor,” he said, looking up, meeting Dom’s eyes at last. “I need a medical evac.”

*

The Dodge had faltered about five minutes out from the warehouse, right where Brian guessed it would when he’d sabotaged the engine that morning. Brian pulled the Supra over to the side of the road and got out in the dark, leaving the headlights on to see. The moment Brian had hung up the phone, they’d run--Vince with Jesse and Dom taking off in a separate direction, some pre-meditated escape plan where Dom sacrificed himself first, _of course_. Letty had stayed with Leon and she let Brian take a look at the injury-- _he’ll be ok. He’s gotta be ok._ A helicopter was on its way, and it made him feel sick to leave them, but they were gonna be ok and Letty yelled at him-- _go, find him!_  Dom was the real target, Brian’s responsibility, the reason for it all.

“Dom,” Brian said, and Dom looked at him like he couldn’t even find the words to express the warring emotions on his face. He looked at the Dodge, back at Brian, and shrugged incredulously.

“Did you break my fucking _car_ , Brian?” he finally asked.

Brian took a deep breath, tried to keep himself from running, because this was the only chance he had. He tossed the Supra’s keys to Dom, who reached out and caught them seemingly on instinct, stared at the keys like he didn’t know what he was seeing.

“Yeah,” Brian said, “But I brought a backup.”

“It wasn’t you,” Brian said, “The other night, the bad job, the crash? That was Tran, and you were trying to stop him. _Tran’s_ crew killed Andrew Staunta. You would never have pulled a job like that. They were your copycats, weren’t they?”

Dom stood like a statue, his eyes burning a hole straight through Brian, but Brian kept his chin up anyway, last conversation they would ever have, probably. Everything was fucked, but he’d look at that face as long as he could. Brian swallowed hard.

“I’m sorry,” Brian said quietly. “I know that it’s not enough,” and he laughed weakly, unable to stop himself from being himself, always ridiculous, “But you know the crazy thing is, I’m sorry for lying, and I’m sorry that I’m not in any way the person you thought I was, and I’m sorry I…I wormed my way into your family, I know that’s unforgivable, but the thing is, I’m mostly sorry for thinking that you would ever be like _that.”_

Dom made a move and stopped, maybe because he couldn’t choose between turning around and bailing in the Supra as fast as possible, and punching Brian in the face. Brian chewed his lower lip and finally broke eye contact, looked up at the starry sky, his favorite California sky, because he’d rather not see either of those things.

“Brian,” Dom said, voice rough.

“Thought you should take a turn with the Supra,” Brian said, a little wildly, and speaking faster now, because Dom had at most a thirty minute window before his lead was over. “Once you get across the border, you’ll be fine. They’ll have Tran now, and Tran has the key to your stockroom. He’s gonna go down now, his whole crew, but you need to _go.”_

“Brian,” Dom said.

“There isn’t gonna be any good music in prison,” Brian sighed, “And the coffee is just terrible.”

“ _Brian,”_ Dom breathed, and Brian closed his eyes completely, because he could feel it coming now, the crash, Dom’s hatred, the end of the fake Brian who had somehow become more real than Brian himself. And there was nothing to do about it, he could only go as loose as possible to try to relax into the trauma, everything melting around him, and his whole life twisted into something ugly that wouldn’t ever heal.

“Why are you doing this?” Dom asked.

“...what?” Brian said, cracking open a quizzical eye.

Dom waved a hand, like words failed. Brian knew the feeling. “Saving me. Leon, Jesse, all of us. Doing this to yourself.”

“Because,” Brian said, choking, “Because it’s _worth it._ Because we ride together, that means something.”

Dom nodded. “Then Bri,” he said with a trace of a smile, “What else matters?” Brian frowned, still waiting. Dom held up the Supra keys, and he smiled, big and unmistakable and totally insane.

“Border’s a few hours away,” Dom said.

“I’m an FBI agent,” Brian said, slowly and carefully, because was it possible that Dom was having a stress-induced breakdown and had forgotten? An _ex-_ agent in about fifteen minutes, probably, his career rolling out in a slow-motion explosion in his rearview mirror, but Dom didn’t need those details.

“You’re family,” Dom said, rolling his eyes like _Brian_ was the one being an idiot. “Everything else, you can tell me about on the drive, and we’ll figure out. You coming?”

 

* * *

 

EPILOGUE

 

Tanner came to arrest him five months to the day after the race. Brian couldn’t say he was surprised, had always known that he was going to turn some corner and find his old life waiting. He didn’t expect the old life to be carrying two cups of coffee that looked like they were actually halfway decent, but he took one in silence as he slid into the passenger seat of the black Civic that had been following him for the last quarter mile.

“You look good,” Brian offered. Tanner snorted over the steering wheel, but it was true. Brian had never seen the man so well-rested.

“I took a _vacation_ ,” the FBI agent said with distaste. Brian smiled into his coffee. “Incredible.”

“They made me do it,” Tanner sighed, “As a condition of the promotion. Not as big as yours though. Mexico, France, and now Cuba? Did I miss anything?”

Brian shrugged. If there were long winding roads the likes of which he’d never felt before in Spain, in Costa Rica, Tanner didn’t have to know about it. If those roads were studded with stars, with more space than Brian had ever felt in his chest, with Dominic Toretto’s hand on his thigh while the speedometer broke a hundred, Tanner didn’t have to know about that, either.

“He’s not gonna let you take me,” Brian ventured. Where five months ago Brian might have felt fear and that gut-curling anxiety clawing its way up his torso, now he only felt the calm reassurance of a man who didn’t yet know _everything_ Dominic Toretto was capable of, but was learning fast. He felt safe, and that was an interesting feeling.

Tanner ignored this. “I thought you might appreciate hearing that our op in LA has finally turned out the majority of Tran’s network,” he said. “A lot of the kids have gotten off on pleas, got the out that Tran never gave them. He had a blackmail list the length of my arm on those young drivers, and they’ve got a chance for something different, now.” 

Brian nodded. In the months he’d had to think about it, he’d guessed that Tran had something like that in mind for Jesse, had visions of a darker empire than Dom had ever imagined. They’d all underestimated Tran.

"And you know," Tanner said slowly, with emphasis, like Brian was an idiot, which, _fair enough_ , "For a while they were chasing leads on other crews in LA, Tran spun some story about the heists not being all theirs, but it never turned anything up. We're closing the case on LA." 

Brian let out the air he didn't even know he was holding. There was a long, thoughtful pause. 

“I know this might not mean anything,” Brian said with a half-laugh, because how could you really communicate any of it? _Thanks for the ride, government, I wish you could know we’re on the same side, in some cosmic way, I wish you knew what I know about Dominic Toretto, the fifth axiom: he makes the world safer._ “But I do appreciate it. It’s what I wanted to happen, never wanted to blow the job, really.”

“Well you didn’t, did you?” Tanner said. “You and Dom together, you took down Tran, didn’t you?”

Brian didn’t even know what to say to that, so he looked at the back of the windshield where traces of dust lingered in streaks that the wipers hadn’t gotten and took a sip of the coffee which was, surprisingly, rich and nuanced, although he guessed that even Tanner couldn’t screw up Cuban coffee.

Tanner cleared his throat. “Way I see it, that _was_ the job. Way I see it, we didn’t really understand the scene in LA, did we? Not the way you did. Seems like Dom Toretto went a hell of a long way towards keeping the scene free of blackmail and murder, and that matters to me a lot more than few shiploads of electronics. And yeah, Brian, I know he’s not gonna let me take you. Like I’d even fucking try. He’s about a block away in an RX right now, isn’t he?”

Brian gave up all pretense, stared straight at Tanner. The son of a bitch looked flat-out smug. Tanner reached across the space between them and patted Brian awkwardly on the shoulder.

“Who knows,” Tanner said, in the voice of a man who, in fact, knows, “You’ve got something special there, you and that crew, the things you can do together. Maybe we’ll need that again someday.”

Dom was innocently reading the paper, head down over the table of their favorite cafe when Brian found him, like he hadn’t been following Tanner for the whole morning while Brian thought he was going for a run.

Brian draped himself over Dom’s back, pressed his face into the other man’s neck. “Mm,” Dom said, something that Brian was not yet and would probably never get tired of, the way that Dom stilled and leaned back against him like he was the most important thing on earth. Dom rested his hands on Brian’s arms and pulled him just a little closer.

“Coffee?” he asked.

“Already had some,” Brian said, but he tugged a hand free to snag Dom’s pastry on a plate. Dom tilted his head back to narrow his eyes at Brian, who just grinned down at him and took an extra-large bite.  

“Had an interesting conversation today,” Brian said.

“Are we getting a new car?” Dom asked. Brian paused for a second, “Maybe. But not that. Saw an old friend. It was...better than I thought it would be.”

Dom stilled, just for a second, and Brian ran a soothing hand down Dom’s arm, because what would Dominic Toretto do with himself if he weren’t being overprotective about somebody? Brian swung himself around to the chair next to Dom, took a comfortable seat and tangled their hands up together, because that was a thing they did now _,_ not that Brian could quite believe it.

“I know we’ve been talking about staying here,” Brian said, “But apparently LA is back on the map for us.” Dom grinned, big and open, and Brian watched his eyes crinkle up in that rare way that only occurred when something really, truly good happened.

“That could be nice,” Dom said nonchalantly, like Brian didn’t watch him video call the house every single night and get a tour of the garage and Jesse’s progress on the car they were building long-distance, didn’t hear him promise Mia they’d find a way back soon.

“After all, Mia misses having you in her way in the kitchen,” Dom said, “Although you’ll have a hard time getting Leon away from the speaker system.” Brian laughed; while recovering from surgery Leon had demanded full and total control of the house music and played country until Letty threatened to shoot him on the other side.

“I had a feeling Tanner would like me,” Dom said with contentment, getting back to the paper. Brian shook his head in wonderment at it all, this life. “Besides, you were a terrible FBI agent.”

Brian gasped in mock outrage. “I was a _great_ agent. You were a terrible _criminal_ ,” he scoffed. Dom laughed and raised their hands up and kissed Brian’s and Brian batted at him with the other hand in exaggerated annoyance, but he loved it.

“Tanner said the funniest thing though,” Brian said a minute later, stealing another bite of pastry. “Something about us helping them out again, like we were all going to work together somehow, you know? Tanner’s crazy. I mean can you imagine? What, we’ll help the FBI take down bad guys with the power of incredible _driving?”_

“Crazy,” Dom agreed, but for a second, there was a thoughtful look in his eye. Then the bell on the cafe door rang, and Dom yanked the pastry back from Brian, and everything else could wait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we are! Thank you for reading, and especially for your kind feedback!! As I said somewhere earlier this is my very first venture into fanfic, and it's been a ton of fun. I ended up with more plot and having more fun here than I anticipated: you might see me back with more! :)


End file.
